* * *
• • •
THE DEAF MAN then reduced the unfortunate life of Egon Hugo Hausmann to so few basic data points that it could hardly have been worth his trouble to be lying. Born, Budapest 1894. Orphaned at nineteen. Exiled shortly thereafter to Athens. In September 1965, broke and coughing blood, he had entered the Manhattan office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at 20 West Broadway, requesting residency papers. The request was denied. Deportation proceedings were initiated but then frustrated by the problem that Hausmann had no papers from any other country to which he could be returned. Anyway, by then he had disappeared.
More recently, a woman named Sandy Colt, claiming to share an address with Hausmann in Queens, had filed a Social Security claim on his behalf. This claim had failed because no Social Security number could be produced and no one by the claimant’s name appeared on the rolls. Colt’s repeated appeals had led a validation investigator to refer the case as a possible attempted fraud to the Office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration. By then, however, the Department of Health had already fined her for running a flophouse out of her apartment. And by the time the SSA investigator knocked on her door, she had kicked out whatever tenants she once had had, probably from fear of being deported, since she had no papers herself.
As to how Hausmann looked, they had only the description in the INS report: white male, six feet tall, one hundred thirty pounds. The picture of him in the file had come unglued and was lost.
After Van Aken had finished, Lorch waited for Vollie to betray any signs of having digested the broad strokes of another’s life.
Vollie said, “Where’s my car, sir? Parked on the street in Queens?”
“You want to act like all you’re doing is taking orders,” Lorch said. “A fair position. You’re getting paid. Money does tend to focus an asset’s energies, but I have to tell you, in our experience it can’t sustain them over the long term. A deeper sense of purpose is required. Yet because the customer’s motivations are classified, I can’t provide you directly with a sense of mission-purpose. So we have a challenge.
“Let me give you another example. Some of my friends who work in the strategic planning outfits at DOD have concluded—and this might offend you—that we have . . . not made a success in Vietnam. And their diagnosis—I admit this took me aback—is that it was the vivid absence of this sense of mission-purpose among the society writ large that has led to what they call the”—an intake of breath and a summoning of nerve to say the word aloud—“failure of our project there. It never occurred to me the defense of our constitutional liberties against murderers and collectivists wasn’t a sufficiently vivid threat to focus our will. But that is their conclusion. Political opposition in itself didn’t stop us. Political opposition was a fungus that grew in the absence of a shining goal that could obliterate all doubt. Do you remember what they used to say the ‘U.S.’ stood for in your Yankee general U.S. Grant? Unconditional Surrender. There was no mistaking his objective. What is your objective?”
“Sir, I am immaterial,” Vollie said.
“Good marine. Why should you care? Except I think you might care anyway, because of the money. Because you probably never agreed to take money for a job and didn’t do the work. You’re vain that way. There’s why I like you. And you obviously know how to handle a certain amount of solitude, not one of my talents. Even so, for this job, as you want to call it, you’ll have to give a damn to do it proper.”
“Sir, this man means nothing to me.”
“But the money means something to you. You can’t help it in your angry bones,” Lorch said. “Also you see a person either dead or getting ready to die with none of his own people close at hand. And you see a reflection there.”
“You guys think I think life has let me down,” Vollie said. “It hasn’t. I’ve had a lot. I’ve had more than my share.”
“Your mother taught you manners.” Pause. For all Lorch’s motormouthing, he had mastered the insidious pause, the moment of letting the hook go in, letting the barb get snagged in the gum, and setting it with a jerk. He said, “You might better have taken some home cooking while you still could have, back at home.”
“Sir, fuck you,” Vollie said. “What were you doing in that plant?”
“Whatever it is I do,” Lorch said. He made his smile of innocent satisfaction. “Sometimes we’re in the structure a long time and come out. Sometimes we’re out a long time and go in, like you’re going in. And sometimes we enter the back door and pass right through to the front and out, and never break stride. And who’s to know we weren’t in there for a hundred years waiting for just now to come out? And who’s to know whether we walked out, or broke out, or somebody unlocked the cell door and said, You’re free to go?”
* * *
• • •
BELOW THEIR PERCH, the postrain midday heat was making the pavement steam, the kind of misty heat that used to mean the corn was about to spurt like mad. Now there was no corn to nag the mind. And wet heat mostly meant defoliated jungle ravines, waiting, nausea from the chloroquine pills the men all took to poison the malaria swimming in their blood.
The check came. Lorch scrawled long division on the placemat, figuring the tip. A silence ensued while the planet of Vollie’s mind rotated inexorably. Sun overtook the part of him that hoped. He could no longer resist asking the question that had brought him here: “Am I nobody from nowhere yet?”
That was when Van Aken handed him the envelope, warm from the man’s jacket. It was exactly the manila envelope with blue border that Lorch had promised in Saigon, of the kind cinched by a length of ruby-red string figure-eighted around two buttons. Vollie unwound it.
Lorch capped his pen. He said, “You are Sergeant Dwight Elliot Tilly, born 1948 in Davenport, Iowa. Sorry for the demotion.”
“Davenport!” Vollie said.
“Best to keep the region of origin. Folks hear it when you talk. What’s the matter with Davenport?”
“My folks didn’t like it.”
“We got your honorable discharge, and no reserve time,” Lorch said.
Vollie looked through the IDs, the payment booklet on a loan for a ’66 Buick Electra, the insurance policies, the discharge papers, the baptismal certificate. There were documents from an Illinois law firm establishing an as-yet-unfunded trust, and there were dental records and proofs of vaccination against childhood diseases. Words in ink on card stock and carbons, some crisp, some folded and smudged with seeming age. The truth invented. The name and dates. The words the wish had conjured. The woman listed as the mother. The blank unfilled for the father. The letters of the name. The person begotten from a faceless crowd.
* * *
• • •
THAT AFTERNOON, a train clattered southwest from Bridgeport, stopping in Fairfield, Rowayton, Darien, Cos Cob. A mostly empty, off-peak train that carried a crew of office painters; a suburban opera club; a man at a window seat in a tired Marine Corps shirt, craning to catch the names of the stations. A grown man not one day old. He had the eager eyes of a boy who, never having betrayed anyone, foresaw no harm coming his way, no one seeking atonement or revenge.
The train turned south, following the coast. It stopped in Mamaroneck, Pelham; densely built places, abounding in parked cars, where no people walked the streets. Sculpted trees and blue sky.
He was alive now in his body alone, and in the memory of no one.
The track bed sunk below street level. The retaining walls of a granite trench crowded the racing train. He had hoped to see the great city from a distance, the bridges and office towers, but the walls of the trench came still closer, choking out the sunlight within the car, where blue paper seat checks littered the floor. A final burst of sun as the train crossed a river.
Land again: a new trench, deeper.
Then all turned black as the train went
truly underground.
He disembarked at Grand Central Station, secure among the schools of commuters swimming in their lanes, at home as in the throng of the Saigon junk bazaar. He was already a part of the city without ever having seen it.
He would take the Number 7 train east into Queens. He would apply for work at a transmission shop, a Pontiac dealership, finally an ice cream warehouse. The city would seem the whole world, its boundaries the boundaries of space; time likewise would seem to stretch to the horizon of time, as if the people here had never been born and never died, and his place among them—a man of perfect inconsequence—were permanent.
6
POSITION SOUGHT: PRACTICAL NURSE
Ursuline High School student seeks 15hrs/wk. First position. Will learn all. Prompt, clean. Experience: bathing/feeding people, mending, fundamentals of cookery (excl. pastries, sauces, roasts). Touch typing 54 w/m (improving). Own bus pass. Call Trisha: MV 5-3416. Amen.
The girl stood at the chain-link gate of the three-family house studying a stenographer’s notebook. She wore vinyl pumps with bright grosgrain bows across the vamps; an A-line dress, yellow with pink piping; linen gloves that buttoned at the wrist. A tied goat regarded her from behind the fence, then went back to chewing the catbrier that grew all over the ragged yard. A few milk crates of stripped paperbacks had overturned in the weeds; the pages were bloated and gnawed. The girl studied her notebook. She breathed. The bent head and tense neck did not move. She continued to study in a state of no skeletal motion for as long as a minute while the wind made her ponytail wigwag like a captured snake. She filed the notebook in her handbag. She climbed the stoop and knocked.
It was the woman Sandy Colt who showed her in.
The apartment, ground floor, was like a chicken coop, squalid and fertile smelling. Discs of pressed foundation powders shriveled on the sills. In the sink, an old cake. Along the hall floors, levees of cellophane, pencil boxes, hosiery, record sleeves. Jars of sand evidently collected from deserts on four continents and labeled as such with embossing tape. Six rooms, each of them somehow the living room, with an appliance that didn’t belong, in the corner. The tub did not share quarters with the commode. Sleep seemed once to have transpired in every room. Quilts and bed pillows were stacked or splayed about all the radiators; a cot by the stove.
The girl followed Miss Colt as she cleared a footpath through the potted cacti, flip-flops, worn pocketbooks, carpet samples, reticulate canvas folded lawn furniture. The place was arranged less as a home of discrete rooms than a warren of contiguous lairs. Hinges remained in some of the interior doorjambs, but the doors themselves had been removed. You might believe you were picking your way to the rear of the apartment only to find you had circled back to the front. They made their way to a curtained closet. Pushing through its many naphthalene-smelling dresses, you found an opening had been cut through the back wall leading to a short passage. And you wouldn’t have taken this cramped space for more than a dead end used to store newspapers and yarn unless you noticed a recess in the wainscoting, darkened by the grease of prying fingertips. With a tug here, a portion of the wall became a miniature door. To fit under the low lintel of this final doorway, Miss Colt stooped into black space. The girl followed.
When the light came on, he was lying there. Just lying there alone.
An old man on a stained mattress, evidently almost naked beneath a tangle of afghans. His white whiskers were yellow at the corners of the mouth. The peeling chest had sunk. The exposed stomach rose feebly with his breath. A toxic fungoid smell. There were no windows. There was a low-watt floor lamp. There was no furniture save the bed and this lamp. The man looked like—who was it who smacked Jesus on the way to the cross and was damned to walk the earth without salvation or sleep until the Second Coming? He sat up and spoke foreignly. The eyes roamed in evident nonseeing. He pleaded in whatever the language. Miss Colt, when questioned as to what he wanted, said, “How should I know?”
The Wandering Jew. Which a creeping plant had been named for him also. He said the thing, whatever it was, insistently, again, the eyes imprecisely following Miss Colt’s movements in his all-but-blindness and decrepitude, in the light of the lamp lacking a shade. The eyes swerving to the cramped doorway as though noticing the second person there and making his appeal in that direction.
Nobody understanding him. People in the room looking and talking, two people, not one; but neither understanding him. The tall person, the usual one; and a stripling girl holding a notebook.
* * *
• • •
MISS COLT SAID she disliked the name Trisha and preferred Trisha’s middle name, Agnieszka, though it was Polish. Having been born in Poland and got away from there with her life, Miss Colt had long since forsworn all things Polish, from friends to church to language, and insisted on translating the name to Agnes. When Trisha felt compelled to correct her pronunciation of the velar-to-alveolar consonants in the middle of that name, Miss Colt changed the name she used again, to Alice, with which she was most satisfied.
That summer, Trisha and the old woman, who had hired her to help look after Mr. Hausmann—her tenant or patient or prisoner or whatever he was—were again watching a CYO Big Brothers basketball game from the makeshift benches the parish had set up on the defunct el, where the view of the game was unsurpassed and even some of the fathers came after work to watch, if they were still attached in some manner to the boys. A rule prohibited the fathers from playing.
Low sun. The Dopplering howl of a passenger jet, screaming as it departed the city. The muggy wind off the bay smelled of molasses.
“Alice, that boy’s fingers are too long, Alice. Be wary of them. I do not like them.” Miss Colt did not need to indicate which boy. For Trisha there existed only the one boy forever, and not even him, because of her calling. He was not only the only boy she would ever love, he was the only boy she would ever need to prohibit herself from loving. This magnified the normal monomaniacal focus of a fourteen-year-old’s crush to a harrowing degree.
She said with a vigorous wave, “I don’t have to worry about his hands, we’re only friends. And I’m giving my life to the Lord, so none of that matters. You don’t know anything about him, pardon my saying.”
“Him the boy, Marlon, or him the Lord?”
Trisha said softly, “Marlon.”
“And you do know somethings about him?” Miss Colt said, licking her custard. “That are?”
“Nobody knows him for real. All they know is gossip.”
“Alice, you are not really going into any convent really, Alice. You have been deterred regarding one boy and him with fingers wrapping halfway around the ball. See? Unnatural. The mischief of the hand, imagine it, while with the other you can’t even imagine—sinister—what it can do. You are in all cases of a different level than this Marlon. With respect to mother and father both in the home. I admired you making up your mind to go to the promenade. He was just a way to go to the promenade in really truth, however.” She said with command, “Next time you go, but with someone else.”
“One just says ‘prom.’”
“Do you know why his mother is in prison? That Marlon’s?”
“She is not. She’s in a rehabilitation hospital.” Trisha looked away at the other girls watching Marlon from the el and despised them.
“How old are you?”
Miss Colt returned as often as she did to this question out of sadism probably, to make Trisha repeat the lie she had committed during their first interview. It was not in the woman’s nature to forget a number.
“Sixteen,” Trisha averred.
“Do you know what they do to sixteen-year-old girls in the cloister? Whole books have been written for centuries about the depravity. And paintings painted. Depraved paintings in very important European art books at the library.”
Trisha breathed, looking down at the blacktop. Marlon acce
pted the ball, which directly sprung away from him toward a teammate on the Shirts who laid up to the basket and was fouled by a sinewy older character on Skins, a white man new to the game in recent months, a veteran, which people had assumed from the tight way of the haircut and the polish on the work boots when he delivered ice cream for the Breyers warehouse. A tattoo of some military or patriotic kind was evident now in his half-clothed state. Marlon and the other Shirts, each in succession slapping the shooter’s hand, gathered around the key, bent, and panted.
The thoughtless urgency Marlon radiated standing at midcourt, just dribbling and looking, gave Trisha the impression of a dense object bending space-time around it. The ball came to him from the outer reaches of the solar system, and he put it in orbit around him and made the other boys and men revolve in epicycles merely by calling the play with a hand sign. The ball didn’t descend from his hand and bounce as he dribbled, it leapt to his fingers, and he threw it away, and it flew back as if it loved him.
The physical proximity of this boy drove Trisha mad.
“Alice, listen, Alice. I am not well enough acquainted with your”—Miss Colt looked below at the speeding Falcons, Corvairs, Biscaynes, Bonnevilles, and Skylarks for the word she wanted—“with your spirit to pronounce on your vocation.”
“Thank you.”
“However, it is inevitable that you will have sexual intercourses. Vocation or no, promenade or no, Marlon or no, yes or no, no or no. In all cases it impends.” She raised a fist overhead and brought it down, slugging the palm at her belly. “It is a force that descends on us all.”
“Please don’t be disgusting,” Trisha said, as wanton fantasies carried on in her sex-mad mind, while other parts of her consciousness convulsed with chastity and reproach.
“The mother was a fence on which radios were hanging,” Miss Colt remarked.
The Volunteer Page 13