The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  She stood empty-handed, breathing shame. “He said it sounds like there’s a party. He wishes he could come out and be with the rest of us. But he doesn’t come out. I wish I could take him to a doctor, but Miss Colt says it’s no use. He’s a terminal.”

  Maybe the man who rowed the ferry had compassion for the dead after all. Mr. Tilly in a polite and hesitating way asked, “Why don’t we go talk to him and keep him company?”

  Miss Colt was absorbed with Lizzy, and Trisha showed him down the hall through the strange doorway in the back of the closet. He didn’t show the least embarrassment on behalf of herself or Miss Colt or Mr. Hausmann at the shabbiness of the room. He was so gentle that he went right up to the stool where Trisha often read to the old man in the afternoons and sat looking into Mr. Hausmann’s plucked-chicken face with no disgust at all, quietly as if not to disturb him.

  “Can he see?” Mr. Tilly whispered.

  “No.”

  Mr. Hausmann’s orbs moved beneath the lids in that way she understood to mean he had come to the near side of the void.

  “Can he hear us?”

  “Right now, I think so.”

  “Does he understand us?”

  “He doesn’t understand anyone but me.”

  “Ask him where he is.”

  “Mr. Hausmann, do you know where you are?”

  “What is that, Russian?” Tilly whispered.

  “Greek,” she said.

  Mr. Hausmann seemed to rouse. The skull rolled amid the ticking of the pillow.

  She asked the question again.

  “Of course, my darling,” he said in Greek. “We are in the world to come.”

  9

  For once, Lorch had nothing to say. He looked across the luncheonette table, up to the ceiling, out the windows that gave on the monumental facade of Grand Central, the arched windows and stone columns and sooty gods lounging in their robes, one of them naked and striding, ready to leap from atop the golden clock into the atmosphere. Then he said, “But Hausmann doesn’t speak Russian.”

  “I said I asked was it Russian, and the girl said it was Greek,” Vollie said. He had not yet divulged where the encounter had taken place. He was holding that in reserve.

  The check came. Lorch didn’t look at it. He had changed his mind about eating. He was off eating for the both of them now. He needed to know everything Vollie had seen, every word they’d exchanged, and he needed to know where Hausmann was living. He distinctly wanted not to be sitting still to hear all this. They would walk; Vollie would disclose; Lorch would attend, mark, and inwardly digest. He wanted to know the color of the clothes, did the posture suggest easeful sleep or was he cramped, in need of a neck stretching? Lorch had all day. Rather, he would call the office and have his schedule cleared. Sergeant Tilly could not possibly appreciate what this meant. To Arthur, to the shop, to Lorch himself. “You’ll be a legend among all the people who never speak of such things,” he said.

  Lorch folded two dollars and put his coffee cup on them and reached for Vollie’s hand, and Vollie felt with a foolish pang the hope that Lorch would guide him now through the jungle of his own misgivings. Instead Lorch grabbed the wrist and led him out the door and to the curb where men in plaid jackets boarded a bus and the car horns made an aural cloud through which it was impossible to hear what Lorch was carrying on about.

  A bread truck accelerated, and the winch of a wrecker growled as it pulled a cable through a breach in the pavement.

  “I can’t hear you,” Vollie said.

  “Give me all of it. Most important, tell me where he is.”

  “Okay, but what did he do?” Vollie asked.

  “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “Hold on,” Vollie said. “What did he do?”

  “It’s enough that the customer knows.”

  The wind stung Vollie’s teeth. “What did he do? I want to know.”

  “We burn that question. It’s easy. We refer to our previous training as to questions.”

  He had let himself hope for guidance from a man whose work in life was to mislead. His temper caught flame. He hated asking questions. He did not need to know the answer to this one. He had asked it almost by accident. But Lorch refused to answer, so now Vollie had to know. “Tell me what he did,” Vollie said.

  “He screwed your mother with his horns. Does it matter?”

  “I’m tired of this. I get to know what he did or I walk from your whole thing.”

  “Our whole thing, you mean. But you can’t walk away. You’re with us now. The body is not one member, but many. You’re in the bowels of your country, Sergeant. You’re part of something bigger than yourself. All you have to be is your one part. If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but one body. So tell me where he is.”

  “No.”

  “We’re in this together, Sergeant. The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary: and those members of the body, which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness. For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked: that there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.”

  A bearded figure wrapped up like a desert cleric pushed a cart up the slope calling, “Cigars, clocks, bananas, cashews, batteries.”

  “Tell me what he did,” Vollie demanded. “And tell me what you want with him.”

  They were standing on a street corner in 1973. The sun fell everywhere like a terrible shower, and they cast no shadows. The light came drenching equally and indifferently the people, the glass and granite cliffs, the luxury vehicles and taxis, and a busted malt liquor bottle’s abundant dark shards. All was visible and plain. The winch tore a pipe out of the earth with slow effort. Oil gleamed from the winch’s cable. Lorch leaned close enough to kiss him but turned the head aside to address his ear.

  “God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues. Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret? But covet earnestly the best gifts: and yet shew I unto you a more excellent way.”

  “You don’t trust me to know the first goddamn thing about what you’re doing.”

  “We’re protecting you, Sergeant. We’re bound to each other now. Don’t you see that? There are ways, and there are ways—of looking out for a person you’re bound to, of taking care of him.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Why is it so repulsive to you and incredible that people look out for each other? You know what the more excellent way is, don’t you, Sergeant?”

  Vollie was walking away again, back down Madison Avenue. But Lorch dogged him. “The more excellent way is love, Sergeant.”

  “Get away from me.”

  “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. Though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.”

  “You’re a liar. Get away from me.”

  “You think you can make it on your own,
Sergeant. You can’t.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FIRST SATURDAY of January.

  Vollie awoke and took an EE train into the city, then the Lexington Avenue line downtown.

  The world of etchings and graffiti on the lobby walls of the post office, the rhymes and faces and numbers, had been painted white. The wire mesh cans for trash were empty. The place was dim and clean as a mausoleum. The sun in its winter course did not enter from behind the bank of mailboxes, and the aperture of his own box was further obscured from within by an angled shade.

  He unlocked the box and took out the two envelopes inside, but the prospect of seeing his old name written there filled him with foreboding, as if a murdered man had come back to life in search of revenge. He closed the box; the foreboding turned to dread; without looking at what was written on the envelopes, he stuffed them in his coat pocket.

  At home, he stuck the envelopes inside the score of the Kinderszenen—a new score he’d found in a street stall in the Bronx—at the page for the eleventh of the Kinderszenen, called “Fürchtenmachen,” or “Hobgoblin,” the one he never practiced and the one his father loved the least: the only one that used the tempo marking Schneller. But even with the envelopes hidden from sight, the dread did not leave him. It seemed to suffuse the apartment. The letters possessed a terrible power, and he had to get away from them.

  He climbed outside to the street. He headed south on foot through the abstruse games of children gathered in every block, children locking arms in circled groups with two of them running around the circle or trying to cut across it like a shot bullet, children ranged in opposition, lacking any sort of ball or stick or sideline but taut and organized and avid to win, sprinting hard then stopping at an invisible mark and turning, running and stopping again, bent and panting, conferring before the next play, huddled in packs, twisted into their common objective like fibers in yarn; and he continued south as best he could determine with the sun hidden by a lid of cloud, through less mixed neighborhoods, Korean or Spanish signage, past figures alone and asleep under trees, alone under a mound of leaves and cardboard scraps, human figures alone and living, and continued midafternoon over what must have been the Long Island Expressway—his feet and hips leading him urgently he knew not where—and skirted a hilly cemetery that teemed with rows of uneven headstones like moon glints on rolling surf, and reaching a wide boulevard he turned west toward the antenna of the North Tower of World Trade, stark on its other island, the faint antenna over the lid of cloud that hid the bulk of the towers and disembodied the upper decks and left them hovering, twin heliports in mid sky for destinations in the ionosphere, the antenna a slim gesture of pointing up and out, and he headed west toward the tower tops, periodically losing them in cloud or amid collections of lower buildings on the boulevard, getting turned around and heading to higher places, climbing a fire escape to find them again, tending toward them as to a lodestone until he got to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and following it south along access roads, construction paths, keeping the expressway in sight above him, and more than once probing the interior into strangers’ home streets, foreign lands and people, and returning to the expressway contours until not a landmark but a person, a jogging woman with a headband, matching wristbands, seemed to lead him inland through a denser settlement, a row-house canyon of sandblasted brick in ornate courses, each house with its own bold color of trim, until he was watching the windows under the crimson pediments of a house where a stooped and silverhead man had just entered, watching from across the street while the day waned.

  As if by merely knocking he could make the man his father’s ghost, he climbed the stoop and knocked and waited. A moment later he knocked again and waited. An ancient voice behind the door said, “St. Michael protects this house, the archangel, patron of the police. He slew the dragon of Revelation. He bears a mighty sword. Go away.”

  He went away. Then on the next block, he was coming out of a pharmacy and unwrapping the cellophane from a new pack of cigarettes when his mother walked right past him on the street. Not a ghost but in the flesh, and she turned a corner, and he followed her and watched her, this woman in a pleated wool skirt and boots with low heels. His mother’s unwonted outfit dissuaded him not at all. She crossed the street sorting her keys and ascended a stoop. She went inside the red door. Lights came on in the windows.

  So many grackles were trying to roost in the same curbside cherry tree it might have collapsed, or they might have hoisted it away in flight, a cherry that had lost the waxy ringed bark of its youth and adopted the scabrous dark bark of old cherries like a disguise put on for later years. He did not approach the door. He stood apart from the nude branches listening to the yo-yo croaks and whistles of the grackles, as if they might be speaking to him some vehement admonition, and to the soft ticking of the dried-up shoots and branches. He watched the bright windows, pleading for a sign. All these specters meant something, knowledge coming to him from the other side, the way the spirit that spoke only through music had long been trying to instruct him in some urgent business, but knowledge of what? “Come outside and tell me what to do,” he said.

  At length the window lights went out. He did not approach the house. He found a bus headed toward Jackson Heights and from there found his way home on foot, not having breakfasted, lunched, suppered, snacked, and not hungry anymore, long past hungry, and fell into bed bone-sore and cross-eyed from weakness and dreamt of Wakefield.

  Private First Class Herschel “Let’m Sleep” Wakefield. A dream consisting at first merely of an intuition of the presence of PFC Wakefield amid the hungering dark, then of his sick shallow breathing, then the smell that might have been indistinguishable from the smell of the three of them—Wakefield, the lieutenant, and he himself—but that some rot had come into it, then the understanding that he was going to keep being alive and they were not because he wanted to go on living more than they did.

  Suddenly, in the dream, the three of them were about to tuck in for supper—Wakefield, the lieutenant, and not he himself but his silverhead father—at the farm with biscuits on the table, pie, a magazine preparation called health salad that was mostly carrots, and a hog they turned on a spit over an immense fire in the middle of the collapsed kitchen floor with the smoke rising right through a hole in the foundered roof, a column of smoke like a tower. He knew himself to be witnessing this impending feast but to be taking no part in it and waited for the others to note his absence, but they only turned the spit, drinking Falstaff beer from cans that did not sweat, near to the fire as they were, so he knew the beers to be warm. “Pop, you don’t drink,” he protested, but none of them heard him. “Tell me what to do,” he said. And the cellar stairs creaked with footfalls. The cellar door opened. Out walked his mother, oak and corn and cherry leaves growing from her head in place of hair. Liquid water composed the rest of her. She shimmered with it through the smoke. She handed her husband a jar of pickled beets to open where he sat by the fire as she turned to a mist in the heat of the flames. “Mamma, don’t go away yet,” he said. Then the dream left him, and he knew himself to be asleep but not dreaming, in the dark.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR WEEKS he saw nothing of Lorch, Van Aken, any of the others from the shop. They could not just have let him quit his duties, but he tried to comport himself as if they had. At the same time, he expected any moment the slowing car, the knock at the door that would mark the fulfillment of the dread that did not abate with time but deepened.

  By and by the logic of the dread began to grow on him. Its omnipresence and shapelessness. If Lorch had threatened him with anything particular, he would have known what to fear. Instead he began to fear everyone and everything, and saw no way out but to tell Lorch where Hausmann was.

  Yet the more he feared, the more adamant he became to tell Lorch nothing. There seemed no length to which Vollie would not go to defy him. Th
e rightness or wrongness of Lorch’s cause—or his client’s cause—whatever it was, had never mattered much, and now mattered not at all. This was what it meant to discover your enemy: the only thing that mattered was to defy him.

  After winter layoffs at the warehouse, Vollie went looking for new work and through a word dropped by the Cuban Julito with a union representative, managed to get at least a half-time temporary job collecting tolls on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the span to the mainland at Unionport suspended under slim, arched towers. Sheer blue towers lacking any adornment, the ash blue of overcast horizons at rush hour, as if to hide the giant towers in sky. A transistor played faint music in the corner of the booth, but change making left him no time to listen to it. The lurid glare of the lights of every car waiting in his line might be Lorch coming—to do what?

  Then on a night of feeble traffic after a snowstorm, the super cut a shift Vollie could ill afford to lose, and he had to go home early. He went inside his dark and quiet rooms. The furnishings were covered with brocade and were very old and dusty. The kitchen having been a wine cellar had no wiring, and he simmered a can of beef stew beneath a kerosene lamp that hung over the stove. He ate from the pot, standing at the range in wet boots. He went to the other room, where he had tacked carpet padding as a muffle to the ceiling, and played the first ten of the Kinderszenen. Then a dam of resistance within him buckled, and he flipped the page to the eleventh, the one called “Hobgoblin,” and his hands played at a frantic scream where Schneller called only for increased speed, and he played the last chord and lifted the pedal and grabbed the first envelope, which had fallen out of the score, and impulsively stuck his thumb under the seal and ripped it open.

  The letter was written in pale ink hard to make out against the brown paper of a grocery bag, but the handwriting was tidy and methodical. The sides of the paper had been torn along a straight edge. The letter bore no date or salutation, as if it continued a thought from a previous page and neither time nor estrangement had intervened in the lapse of the correspondence: