Breed (29 page)

“Okay, no problem. I understand. But there’s something you need to understand too.” Alex feels one of the guards almost on him, and he whirls quickly, fixes the man with a stare that is so unexpectedly powerful that the guard stops for a moment.

“I am here for my children,” Alex says. “My children are right here in this museum—where, by the way, I am a member, and where my father sat on the board of trustees. Not that it makes a difference.”

By now, about two hundred people have gathered around to listen and watch this drama unfold.

“I am going to ask you to calm down, sir,” the guard says. He takes a small tentative step toward Alex.

“I am calm. And I apologize for the…” For what? The word is gone. Alex realizes that his immunity to the aphasia that has increasingly vexed Leslie is running out. If the decay of her speech is any harbinger of what will happen to him, his days of being able to easily express himself are coming to an end.

“Listen to me,” he says, though he has always believed it is a crass and hopeless announcement of your own impotence to demand to be heard, Mark Antony’s speech to the rabble notwithstanding.

“No, sir, I need you to listen to me.”

The guard is just about to grab Alex by the wrist when Alex utters the magic word. “My children have been kidnapped by a pedophile and he has them somewhere in this building. You want to toss me out of here—fine. You want to put me in jail? I’ll spend my ten minutes in jail. But in the meantime, that pedophile has my kids and I want to know what you are going to do about it.”

It turns out that the sixth-graders are more than a little revved up by the various Representations of Evil, and before long a few smart-ass remarks lead to a deluge of comments and jokes, which in turn leads to shoving, tugging, and the striking of poses—even in a world of Internet porn, the sight of a few painted bare breasts seems to have unhinged half the kids. And so, after quickly learning that their threats are either disbelieved or simply not heard, the adults in charge play what they believe to be their trump card. “If you guys can’t calm down, we’re leaving this museum and going right back to Our Lady Gate of Heaven,” the teacher says, her voice rising, hardened.

Just then, however, one of the parent volunteers, a lovely young mother dressed as if for a date, comes clattering back into the room in her daring high heels. She has been downstairs to get a map of the museum and while she was there she heard Alex’s heartfelt plea to the guards. “There’s an old guy downstairs,” she says, “and he says there’s some pervert up here who’s got his kids. A bunch of the guards are running around.”

“All right, let’s go,” the teacher announces, and for the moment the class is docile, obedient, and they follow her out of the Lucifer show’s first room. Michael, Alice, and Adam are suddenly bereft of human camouflage—at this point they are in front of an immense brown, gray, and yellow painting of Death astride a horse, the Devil and his strangely shy-looking steed trotting beside him in a landscape littered with human skulls. And in the relative quiet left in the wake of the sixth-grade class’s departure, they hear what sounds like an army’s worth of footsteps pounding up the grand staircase.

Alex Twisden has swayed the jury of guards, and they are on their way to apprehend the terrible man who has his children.

As soon as they hear the guards rushing up to the museum’s second floor, the twins break into a full-out run, with Michael close behind, marveling at their grace, their speed. They have no idea where they are going—the only plan is to
go.
They race past a couple of elderly women, one of them in a wheelchair; past an art student who has set up her easel and is copying a Hieronymus Bosch triptych; through the next gallery and the next as the display of Lucifer in art continues, and half the patrons wear earphones as they listen to the mellifluous voice of an art historian explaining the symbolism and historical background of the work. Those who are listening to the lecture seem to have no idea that two children and a man are racing through the rooms, and those who do notice can make no sense of it, and through sheer confusion (plus a desire to remain safe and uninvolved) they are virtually motionless as Michael and the twins run for their lives.

Kings and queens, soldiers and frightened hares, rich merchants, peasants, and allegories of salvation, all of them in elaborate frames, go flashing by as one room turns into the next. Michael and the children who cleave to him as their only hope search for a way out of the museum. Now and then they see a sign signifying an exit, but when they race toward it they find themselves in yet another gallery. They are lost in a maze of priceless art.

“Over here,” Michael says, so winded he can barely get the words out. He is pointing to a small sign that shows a stick figure making its way down a sketchily rendered staircase. They find themselves in what feels like a little-used corridor, rather dimly lit, housing glass cases jammed with Egyptian artifacts. But when they get to the staircase, there are multiple yellow ropes blocking it off and a sign that says
DANGER.

“We need to separate,” Michael says.

“No, no,” Adam says, coming quickly to his teacher’s side.

“Don’t leave us,” Alice says. Her eyes glitter like pulverized quartz. “Please.”

Michael puts his arms around both children and gathers them close. He had not known how fierce and incoherent love could be, how it can turn within you like a wheel of fire. He will do anything to protect these two, even as he grapples and gropes his way toward a sense of what he is protecting them from.

“We’re going to be okay,” he says. He kisses the top of Adam’s head; the boy’s scalp is drenched with sweat. He pulls Alice even closer to him. “Okay?” he whispers to her. “Okay?”

“Thanks,” she manages to say.

“They’re looking for a grown-up and two kids,” Michael says. “If we split up, we have a better chance. So here’s what. Find your way out, one way or another. Go to the Eighty-Sixth Street entrance to the park and walk south. Okay? Walk south on the sidewalk as close to the museum as you can get. And count fifty benches. All right? How many benches?”

“Fifty,” Adam says.

“Fifty,” says Alice.

“And that’s where we’ll met.”

“Then what?” Alice asks.

“We’ll figure it out,” Adam says.

“Yes,” Michael says. “We will. I promise you that.” To his surprise, his voice wobbles. It is unable to bear the full freight of his emotion right now. “We will figure it out.”

They stow their jackets, figuring that anything that differs from Alex’s description will be to their benefit. Adam heads right, Alice goes left, and Michael hopes to look like any single man strolling through the Met as he wanders past ancient and near ancient art, and the art of Korea, and Chinese art, even stopping now and again to admire an urn, a spoon, an intricately stitched orange-and-blue robe. His heart is drumming at an impossible, unsustainable speed, as if it knows its moment of extinction is near and wants to quickly use up the allotment of beats it has been granted by fate.

Look normal, look normal,
he tells himself.

While he is involved in this impersonation of a man of leisure, gazing at the finery that once belonged to a dowager empress, he is suddenly touched rather brusquely on the shoulder—somewhere between a tap and a clasp—and when he turns around he sees a Latina museum guard and a NYPD beat cop with a reddened face and a handlebar mustache.

Michael manages to look at the two of them with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance. He raises his eyebrows, as if to say
Yes?

“Identification,” says the cop, allowing himself the shorthand of the all-powerful.

Michael speaks to them both in fluent and very, very rapid French, all the while pointing this way and that, hoping, first and foremost, that neither of them speaks French, and next that his gesturing will be complicated enough to further frustrate them and send them on their way.

Whatever quick description these two have been given, the particulars of Michael—a man alone speaking French!—convince guard and cop that they are wasting their time with him, and in a moment they continue their haphazard search for the pedophile and the two little innocents.

Meanwhile, Adam is making his way past European sculpture, Islamic art, and musical instruments, walking quickly, with his hands in his pockets and his head down, as if he were looking for something that he dropped on the floor. He finds a staircase leading to the first floor, and he stops at the top of it and takes a deep breath.
Let me go, let me go,
he whispers to himself. He holds on to the banister. It is warm from the body heat of hundreds of hands. His legs tremble. He forces himself to feel lucky and takes the first step. He can see there are guards waiting at the bottom.

His only hope is that they are looking for a grown-up with two kids and so one child all by himself, looking relaxed and happy, swinging his arms back and forth, will be allowed to pass.

At the same time, Alice moves through the European paintings, past the muddy, moody Rembrandts, past the rearing white horses, the smoke-wreathed battlements, the choppy seas, the hopeful dawns, the enigmatic women in capes and mantillas, the haughty men in beige britches and shining boots. She is counting her breaths and is now up to four hundred. Leaving the paintings behind, she finds herself in a gallery filled with statues, some of them broken, some intact: Is that Neptune? Is that Pan? Is that a wolf or a dog? There is a din of voices in this room and once again she meets up with the sixth-grade class, who have finally pushed the teacher and the parent volunteers over the edge; the students all seem to know it as they abjectly march in single file with their eyes cast down while the teacher, who seems to be in a state approaching despair, mutters, “Remind me never to take you all anyplace nice.”

Alice falls in line with the class as they make their way down the main staircase. She is walking next to a girl a few inches taller than herself, a girl with thick braids and dark brows. The girl glances at Alice and seems to register the fact that Alice is not in her class, nor is she someone whom she has ever seen before, but this knowledge is eclipsed by her unhappiness about being removed from the museum. “Do you think this place used to be a castle?” the girl asks Alice.

“I guess,” says Alice, though she knows better.

Despite the search for the so-called pedophile and the two so-called abducted children, it looks not that much different from any other day at the Metropolitan when the class and Alice reach the first floor. There are police standing at the exits, but their expressions are mildly curious, and their posture is relaxed. And meanwhile, people are streaming in and out, alone and in pairs and in groups, tourists, art lovers, lonely people, young and old.

The police at the door pay scarcely any attention as the sixth-graders and Alice stream past them and outside. She continues to count her breaths as she steps out into the cold gray afternoon.

Michael is counting too: benches. Walking backward so he can see Adam or Alice approach. But where are they?

He is at the limit of what he can endure. He has been in a constant state of anxiety since Adam appeared at his apartment. He has entered a world he has never imagined. The rug of reality has been yanked from under him by an unseen hand. He feels alone, abandoned, unequal to the task. And Xavier:
Where in the fucking hell are you?

At the fiftieth bench, he stops, sits, facing east. Before him is a statue of King Jagiello, the fifteenth-century unifier of Poland and Lithuania, the grand duke of Lithuania, vanquisher of the Teutonic aggressors at the Battle of Grunwald. The statue was brought to New York by the Poles for the 1939 World’s Fair, and while it was here, Poland fell to the German army, after which monuments celebrating the defeat of the Teutonic hordes were not welcome in Poland, and so the bronze statue stayed put, and it has been here ever since. The king’s armored horse looks rather demure, its head cocked to one side, its eyes startled and wide as it gazes down and off to one side, as if to avoid the sights of the slaughter sure to come. But Jagiello himself brims with military bluster, his crown firmly perched on a head of flowing hair, his expression stubborn and royally confident, his arms raised in a V, a long sword in each hand, the swords themselves crossed in an X, one tip pointing north and the other south.

“May I trouble you for a light?” a voice says.

Startled out of his reverie, Michael sits up straighter. Something tells him not to turn around. A thumping heartbeat later, Alex Twisden is sitting next to him. Twisden smells of earth and wind; his shoes are splattered with mud.

“Get the fuck away from me,” Michael says in a quiet voice.

“Why are you in my life?” Alex asks. He folds his arms over his chest, stretches out his legs. “Why do I even fucking know you?”

A couple of nannies wheeling their well-swaddled charges walk by. It has gotten colder, and when the nannies open their mouths to talk, clouds of vapor come out and hang in the air like dialogue balloons in a comic strip. One of them glances at Alex and whispers something to her friend, who looks back over her shoulder at Twisden as the two women go on their way.

“I’m going to call the police,” Michael says.

“Good! The police are looking for you. The crazy fag who took two children away from their home.”

“The children are terrified of you, Twisden. Terrified.”

Alex lays his hand on Michael’s knee. Pats it. Squeezes it. Pats it again.

“You’re a good person,” Twisden says. “I know this.”

Michael doesn’t say anything. From a distance, he sees Adam, walking slowly, counting the benches.

“I would like to know what my children have said about their parents.”

“What are you worried about? What is the thing that you don’t want them to say?”

“Don’t joust with me, Mr. Grade-School Teacher. You’re way above your pay grade. I do this for a living. Rule number one: you don’t ask a question unless you already know the answer.”