What Burns

by Dale Peck

  I’m afraid I’m going to have to use a tweezers for the last of it.

  I opened my eyes. Charlie was making a face, as if performing this surgery hurt him instead of me.

  He asked if he was hurting me.

  I was still remembering the way the last chipmunk had lain on its side after I’d fished it from its home, eyes closed, chest fluttering as rapidly as a bee’s wings. I’d dared to stroke its heaving ribs. The chipmunk curled itself into a ball around my finger, its mouth and the claws of all four paws digging at me until I flung it away and it scurried to safety.

  It hurts, I said, then caught Charlie’s arm as he flinched. My head hurts, I said. What you’re doing doesn’t hurt.

  Benny’s sold bikes every day except Sunday from eleven until seven, but was always to be bustling with activity. In the mornings a young woman worked on the bicycles. This was Deneisha, who seemed to live on the third floor. Every ten minutes a younger version of her leaned out the window to relay a request: Deneisha, Mami says why you didn’t get no more coffee if you used the last of it? Deneisha, Benny says to call him back on his cell phone now. Deneisha, Eduardo wants to know when are you gonna take the training wheels off my bike so I can go riding with him? Deneisha, her thick body covered in greasy overalls, inky black spirals of hair rubberbanded off her smooth round face, ignored these interruptions, working with Allen wrenches and oil cans and tubes of glue on gears, brakes, tires. For bicycles that still had a chain fastened to them she had an enormous pair of snips, their handles as long as her meaty arms, and for U-locks she had a saw that threw sparks like a torch as it chewed through tempered steel.

  After the shop closed there was a lull until the sun went down, and then the bicycles began to arrive. Every thief was different. Some skulked, others paraded their booty openly, offering it to anyone they passed on the sidewalk, but few spent any time bargaining with Benny. The more nervous the thief, the less interest Benny showed, the less money he pulled from the roll of bills. He seemed completely untroubled by his illicit enterprise, absorbing stolen bikes with the same equanimity with which he consumed tins and cartons of delivered food. Only the white kids, the college-aged junkies selling off the first or the last of their ties to a suburban past, tried his patience. I said ten bucks, I heard him say once. Take it or leave it.

  Charlie couldn’t understand my obsession. We’d only been together three months, and what I’d learned about him was that he took in information with a stenographer’s zen. Existence is the sum of experience, he’d shrugged that first night, as if the events of our lives were drops of water and we the puddles at the end of their runneled paths, little pools of history. When I still wouldn’t let it go he prodded harder.

  Is it the coincidence that bothers you, or the fact that he hit you? Or is it that you pretended innocence of what you were getting when you bought the bike in the first place, and now it’s come back and bitten you in the ass? Or—he kissed my bandage gently—whupped you upside the head?

  At the time I couldn’t answer him, and hindsight makes it that much less clear. I offered him words like cleave and hew, words that could mean both cutting and binding, but Charlie waved my rhetoric away. Context makes meaning clear, he said. Then, more bluntly: Choose.

  But I couldn’t choose. My life felt splayed on either side of the incident with Adam like his long thin legs straddling the ancient bicycle—which he did, in fact, leave for me. Like conjoined twins, my two selves were linked at the hip, sharing a common future but divided as to which past to claim. And so every day I rode Adam’s creaking iron bike to a stoop across from Benny’s and waited for something like Deneisha’s saw to sever my old unmolested self, leaving my new scarred body to get on with things.

  At a party Charlie dragged me to I told the story behind the bandages on my cheek and forehead a half dozen times. By then the two bruises had joined into one, across my brow, down the left side of my face, vanishing into the hairline. The single bruise was mottled black, purple, blue, green, yellow, but, like the story I told over and over again, had become essentially painless, and as the night wore on Charlie added his own coda to my words. Victim, he would say, turning my mottled left profile to the audience. Thief, he said, showing them my right.

  Uh oh, he said at one point, here comes trouble. Trouble was a man around our age, one hand holding shaggy bangs off his unlined forehead as though he were taking in a sight, the Grand Canyon, a caged animal. From across the room I heard his cry. Now where did I leave that man? His gaze fell on Charlie. There he is.

  Charlie introduced him as Fletcher: his ex-boyfriend, who’d dumped Charlie last summer after a five-year relationship that Charlie referred to by the names of various failed political unions: Czechoslovakia, Upper and Lower Egypt, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His arms around Charlie’s waist, Fletcher pulled him a few feet away, as if together they were examining my bruised face. Is this really the new model, Fletcher said, or just something you picked up at Rent-a-Wreck? Charlie offered me a wan smile but, like the Orangeman that he was, seemed content in Fletcher’s possessive embrace. Under his questions, I recited once again the story of the two bicycles, the single blow, adding this time the week of camping out across from Benny’s shop. Fletcher’s assessment: I don’t know why you’re focusing on the Puerto Rican, he’s just a businessman. It was the Slav who sucker-punched you.

  On the bicycle ride to Benny’s, Adam told me he came from Slovenia. He came here on a student visa, stayed on after his country seceded from the Yugoslavian republic; that was a decade ago. Back home, he told me, the terrain is hills and mountains but everyone rides bicycles like this. He smacked the flecked chrome of his handlebars. Often you see people, not just grandmothers but healthy young men, pushing their bicycles up inclines too steep to pedal. I wanted a mountain bike.

  He told me he was illegal, worked without a green card, had almost to live like a thief himself; he had a degree in computer science and an MBA, had emigrated to get in on the dot-com boom but ended up tending bar at Windows on the World. After Fletcher’s harangue I bought two books on Balkan history at the Strand, a novel and a book of journalism, and I read them on the stoop across from Benny’s in an effort to understand what Adam meant by telling me about his stunted furtive existence, the two kinds of bicycles, the broadside with the lock. Why did he need a mountain bike, if he was only going to ride the swamp-flat streets of the East Village?

  But then: Grace.

  I was sitting on the stoop across from Benny’s absorbed in the cyclical tale of centuries of avenged violence that is Balkan history. Two plaster lions flanked me, their fangs dulled beneath years of brown paint. A woman stopped in front of me and hooked a finger around one of the lion’s incisors. That is a great book, she said with the kind of enthusiasm only a middle-aged counterculturalist can summon. She pointed not to the book I was reading but to the novel on the concrete beside me. Against the heat of early September she wore green plastic sandals, black spandex shorts, a halter top sewn from a threadbare bandanna. The spandex was worn and semitransparent on her thin thighs and her stomach was so flat it was concave; a ruby glowed from her navel ring, an echo of the bindi on her forehead. She could have been thirty or fifty. She let go of the lion’s tooth and picked up the novel even as I told her I looked forward to reading it. Like, wow, she exclaimed, and when she blinked it seemed to me her eyes were slightly out of sync. She held the book up to me, the cover propped open to the first set of endpapers. An ex libris card was stuck on the left-hand side with a name penned on it in black ink: Grace was the first name, followed by a polysyllabic scrawl ending in -itz. The same card adorned the book I was reading and, nervously, my index finger traced the hard shell of scab above my left eye. What she said next would have seemed no more unlikely had the lion behind her spoken it himself: That’s my name.

  She didn’t ask for her books back—they weren’t stolen, she’d bought them for a class at the Ne
w School and sold them afterwards so she could afford a course in elementary Sanskrit—but I insisted she take them anyway, sensing that a drama was unfolding somewhat closer than the Balkans. In the end she accepted the novel but told me to finish the history. Over coffee I told her about Adam and the bicycle, and Grace was like, wow.

  Once I got the same cabdriver twice, she said. She blinked: her left eye and then, a moment later, her right. I mean, I got in a cab with a driver I’d had before. I tried to ask him if he’d ever, you know, randomly picked up the same person twice, besides me of course, but he didn’t speak English so I don’t know. Her face clouded for a moment, then lit up again. Blink blink. Oh and then once I got in the same car on the F train. I went to this winter solstice party out in Park Slope, and the kicker is we went to a bar afterward so I didn’t even leave from the same stop I came out on. I think I got off at Fourth Avenue or whatever it is, and then we walked all the way to like Seventh or something, it was fucking freezing is all I remember, but whatever. When the train pulled into the station it was the same train I’d ridden out on, the same car. Totally spooky, huh?

  How’d you know it was the same one?

  Graffiti, duh. Hector loves Isabel. Scratched into the glass with a razor blade in, like, really big letters.

  And the cabdriver?

  His name was Jesus.

  Just Jesus?

  Just Jesus.

  The incident with Adam had been painful but finite. A city tale, one of those chance meetings leading to romance or, in this case, violence; already the bruise was fading. But the incident with Grace was more troubling, awoke in me a creeping dread. What if life was just a series of borrowed items, redundant actions, at best repetitious, at worst theft? “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Okay, but what if repetition happened regardless of memory? What if we were all condemned? I felt then that I understood the history I was reading, began to sympathize with the urge to destroy something that continually reminded you of your derivative status. Like most people, I first bought used items out of poverty, but after my fortunes improved I continued to buy secondhand from a sense of a different debt. Clothes, books, bicycles: I wanted to pay my dues to history, wanted to wear it on my back, carry it in my hands, ride it through the streets. But now it seemed history had rejected my tithing, rejected it scornfully. The past can be sold, it mocked me, but it can never be bought.

  Charlie was less blasé about Grace than he’d been about Adam, but ultimately dismissed it.

  It takes three events to form a narrative. Two is just a coincidence.

  But a coincidence that’s made up of two coincidences. What’s that?

  Proof that New York, as someone once said, is just a series of small towns.

  The first night, after cleaning and bandaging my wounds, Charlie put me to bed and spooned himself behind me, his arms around me, the outline of his erect penis palpable through two pairs of underwear. At the time it was so familiar I didn’t really notice it, but later it came to preoccupy my thoughts. It was like Adam’s mountain bike, misplaced, a tool for which the pertinent scenario existed only at a remembered remove. Or Grace’s ex libris cards, a claim of ownership on something she had no intention of keeping, like a gravestone on a ghost’s abandoned grave. The night I met Grace, Charlie and I had sex for the first time since Adam had whacked me in the head, and the whole time I was unable to shake an image of Fletcher’s face next to Charlie’s crotch. See this? This is mine. Later that night, when I was dozing off and Charlie was leafing through the book that had fallen from my hands, I suddenly sat up.

  Fletcher.

  What about Fletcher?

  You used to belong to him. Silently but victoriously, I ticked off forefinger, middle finger, ring finger. Then: That’s three.

  The next day, after Charlie went to work, I stayed in the apartment. I worked in the morning, ordered lunch from an Italian place around the corner. I read while I ate tepid fettuccine and kept reading after I’d finished my meal. All this was normal, or had been normal, if you disregarded the weeks I’d spent in front of Benny’s. On a pad made up of reused sheets from early drafts of stories was written “shaving cream, milk,” but after I’d finished the history I neglected my shopping and instead took a nap. I didn’t wake until Charlie called that evening after he got off work.

  Dinner? There’s that new French place on 12th.

  Oh, I said. I’m sorry, I was hungry, I ordered in. Mexican.

  That’s fine, Charlie said. I’ve got some chicken in the fridge, and some work I really should get done. My place tonight?

  Oh, I said again. I’m sorry. I, um. My head’s pounding. Do you mind?

  Charlie didn’t say that’s fine the second time. He said, Sure, and it seemed to me his voice wasn’t annoyed but instead relieved. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.

  The next day I stayed in again, working. I’d been trying to write about Adam since I’d met him, but after I met Grace the story suddenly fell into place.

  In the story I’m afraid to leave my apartment. I’m afraid that a stranger will stop me on the sidewalk and put his hand on my Salvation Army chest. That’s my shirt. Someone else claims my pants. Nearly naked, I skulk indoors. But not even my home is safe. A visitor runs his hand over my sofa (Housing Works, $250). I used to love this couch. Another pulls open the drawers of my desk (Regeneration, $400): What are the odds? Finally someone waves their arms, taking in the time-smudged dimensions of my tiny apartment. This used to be my home. My throat is dry, I go to the faucet for a drink. But as the water runs I wonder: how many bodies has this passed through to get to me?

  But it was worse than all that. When Charlie came over that evening he glanced through the story I’d written and said, Haven’t I read this before?

  On the third day I didn’t leave my apartment, Charlie called me and told me a story:

  Once I wanted to hack all my hair off with a pair of scissors. But I had a crewcut at the time. So I went out and bought next year’s calendar and marked the date a year hence with a big red X. For the next twelve months I didn’t touch my hair, and when the day with the X came up I looked in the mirror and realized I liked my hair long. I realized that my crewcuts had been a way of hacking off my hair all along.

  I said the only thing I could think of.

  Huh?

  Your whole shut-in thing, Charlie said. It’s not real. Or it’s not new. It’s just a symbol of something you already do. You’ve already done. Think about it. Where is it you’re really afraid to go?

  I thought about it.

  You have a crewcut now, I said.

  Give me a break, will you? I’m going bald, it’s the dignified thing to do.

  When we met Charlie gave me a road map. This was on our third date. Oh, okay, our second. We’d gone back to his apartment and he spread the map out on his kitchen table (IKEA, ninety-nine bucks). The table, like everything else in Charlie’s apartment, was new and neat but the map was old and wrinkled, a flag-sized copy of the continental US, post-Alaska, pre-Hawaii. Some of the creases were so worn they’d torn, or were about to.

  Now, Charlie said. Fold it.

  There were four long creases, twelve short, and folding the map proved as hard as solving Rubik’s cube. I got it wrong a half dozen times before I finally got the front and back covers in the right place and, a little chagrined, handed it to Charlie.

  Did I fail?

  You passed. With flying colors. Anyone who can fold a map on the first try is way too rational for me.

  And what about people who can’t fold one at all?

  In answer, Charlie pulled open the white laminate-fronted drawer of one of those nameless pieces of furniture, a storage unit. Inside were several maps practically wadded up, as well as dozens of takeout menus and hundreds of crooked twist ties. He had to scrunch the pile down before the drawer would clos
e again.

  Wow, I said. The map test and your messy drawer. You must really like me.

  Charlie grinned, sheepish but pleased. It’s about time I entered into a new alliance.

  By the time I understood what that meant, I thought I was ready to sign. And then Adam came along.

  On the fourth day, Grace called. When I asked her how she’d gotten my number she said, Out of the book, and when I started to ask how she knew my last name she interrupted me and said, Honey, I think you’d better turn on the television.

  Months later, when the indemnity claims began to be discussed in the press, New Yorkers would learn that the opposing sides, the insurance companies and the property owners, differed on a crucial issue: whether the collapse of the towers constituted one event, or two. The World Trade Center, it turned out, was insured for three billion dollars, but if it was deemed that the crash of the second plane into the south tower, not quite twenty minutes after the north tower was hit, constituted a distinct historical event, the insurers would have to pay the full amount twice, in effect saying that the buildings had been destroyed not once but two times. A lot of the argument, as it turned out, was rhetorical: to the insurers, the World Trade Center was a single site—maps marked it with a single X, guidebooks gave it only one entry—that had been destroyed by a united terrorist attack. But to the property owners, the Twin Towers were, architecturally, structurally, visibly, two buildings destroyed by two separate planes, either one of which could have missed its target. Which argument began to make more and more sense to me as time went on and details about what had happened came out. Nearly three quarters of the people who died were in the north tower, and, of those, more than ninety percent were on floors above those hit by the plane, including dozens of people attending a breakfast conference at Windows on the World. The reason why far fewer people died in the second tower, which stood for less than an hour, as opposed to the hundred minutes the north tower remained intact, is that people in the south tower saw what had happened to the north tower and evacuated their offices. Regardless of whether you considered the two plane crashes coincidence or concerted assault, the planes had struck separately—and people in the second incident had learned from the first.