City of Strangers (20 page)

Claire closes her eyes; she needs to concentrate. It is easier to think now, with that man gone, with all of them gone. The pain of sanity returns, the last, cool numbness leaves her, and with her eyes closed she can't prevent impressions from forming there, highly vivid and burning with acrylic brightness. In the dusk of her eyelids the reenactment plays in silent, wretched detail. Paul's face was abstract and ghostlike, and before he killed that man his eyes flashed with a rough glow – it was desire, he was enjoying the manual sensation of plunging a knife into another human being. She doesn't want to have these thoughts, but she knows what she saw.

And then, when it was over, Paul, staring at her with loose wild eyes and heaving monstrously with breath, told her he didn't want to call the police. She consented – but for the life of her she can't remember why. She was unable to speak: to put the signature of her own decisions on the event. An anesthesia of shock immersed her as she watched Paul use the knife, and it lingered as events gathered momentum around her. She became more and more numb. Ben asked for things; she fetched them. There is perhaps another reason for her acquiescence to Paul: she was terrified of him. With a tight jerk of her neck Claire looks once more at the blood. Will it even wash off? Given a wet sheen by the shadows, the bags of cleaning supplies hunch on the table, slouching and losing form like a pair of crumbling sandcastles. They seem unequal to the task; thirty-five dollars and eighty-seven cents' worth of chemicals couldn't possibly undo tonight's events. Her participation has been passive until now. She watched, she allowed. Applying herself to the job of scouring away blood is altogether a different order of engagement.

Her head hurts. She bites at a fingernail, wishing she had access to a voice other than her own, this useless, cluttered hum. Amazing, how quickly Paul rejected the involvement of the police – it seemed almost reflexive. What happened, what she watched, was much too large to be handled by those untrained for the task, not to pass through the machinery of authority. Civilization has established standards of behavior, reasonable expectations of its members, a mutually beneficial collective bargain. It could have protected Paul – people act unpredictably in moments of extreme anger or terror. Tonight can't be undone, but it could have been explained, absolved. By now Paul's actions have certainly crossed some threshold of criminality. Why did she let him convince her not to call the police, forcing her thoughts onto the same, irrational frequency, making her an accomplice?

It isn't that she has any sympathy for the dead man. When Paul asked what had taken place she supplied an incomplete version. The rest was simply too terrible to experience again, even as language. What did she tell Paul? Something about that man touching her face. That much is true. But it wasn't the end. He stood behind her, like a dentist, while she sat in a kitchen chair. She did not and could not move. Everything inside her trembled and twanged. Beer from the broken bottle made a warm scrim around them, and he'd been drinking before he arrived; the smell fell heavily from his mouth whenever he spoke. When he reached out, from behind, and rested a finger against her cheek, her entire skin leapt. With a finger, its dirty, ragged nail, he traced a line down her cheek, hewing to the ridge of bone beneath the skin. It moved in blurry proximity, a dark thing just below her eye, like an insect she couldn't swat away. Everywhere he touched, her skin registered the fingerprint, the oils, even once he'd moved on. A long, ribboned trail tingled across her face. He slowly brought the finger to the corner of her mouth, where she felt, just slightly, a pressure on her lips that forced the flesh inward, against her front teeth. The other hand held her chin in place. She couldn't stop it; he continued to push, her lips came apart, the finger was inside her mouth.

'Bite,' he said. She felt it between the blades of her teeth. The tip of a finger is mostly bone; she could feel it just below his skin. Tears boiled in her eyes. In vain she tried to push away his hand. 'Bite it. You want to.' Which was true. Every nerve called for her to use her teeth, to clamp down as hard as possible. To bite through meat. What stopped her wasn't principle: she would have given him what he asked for. It was revulsion at the idea of flavor, the way a thing opens, flowers, once you begin to chew.

Claire doesn't know how long he held it there. He moved the finger from one corner of her mouth to the other, ticking across her teeth, even once tapping her tongue, which she immediately furled into the back of her mouth. Then, with a simple chuckle, he removed it. He didn't say anything about it afterward, and from that moment on Claire, who had tried once or twice to talk with him, to learn what he wanted, how she could bring the ordeal to an end, could no longer speak. He'd already called Paul, and while they continued to wait, before her neighbor happened to stop by, he sat across from her, pleased with himself, his jaw hanging in a wolfish grin.

As soon as he was gone, in the gap of time when she was at last alone, she furiously brushed her teeth, again and again and again, until she simply pumped the mint paste directly from the tube into her mouth and smeared it around with her tongue, trying to wash out the taste of his finger, the salt, sweat, tobacco, the sour taste of garbage, of decay.

Once more she feels on the edge of tears, before realizing, in a cold, compressed burst, that it isn't the consequences for Paul if she calls the police that should concern her: it is the consequences for herself if she doesn't.

So this is what's changed. As a divorced woman, the calculus of dependency between herself and others, between herself and Paul, has shifted. She wishes her ex-husband no harm. She hasn't ceased to love him, but that doesn't mean she owes him the kind of high, selfless loyalty he's asked for. When she slept with him – an event whose significance, if it ever had any, is now zero – it changed nothing about this new reality.

She doesn't know what they intend to do with it, but however Paul and his brother dispose of the body, someone will find it. They've embarked on this adventure as amateurs; there are details they will miss, they will leave behind a record of tonight's events and, however long it takes, the police will eventually reconstruct what happened, or a version of it, and then they will come knock on Claire's door: and then everything, everything she is, everything she wants to be, all the lustrous promise, everything will change. On the wall, immediately in her line of sight, hangs a gift from Bernard on the occasion of her hiring at the museum: a small pencil drawing by Schiele, of a gnarled, deathly hand, on cream-white paper. There are few possessions she prizes more.

Claire, ridiculously, is still dressed for a fancy evening. Wrinkles of fabric have gathered between her knees, where lines of light, like seams of ice, fill the creases. Smoothing them with her thumb, she recalls the circumstances which so recently surrounded her: the champagne, the conversation, the wealth and influence, the world to which she now belongs. It is a world of privilege, order, importance, responsibility. But it is one she earned. It belongs to her, also. She rises; it does not seem right to sit for this. Quieting the last alarms of guilt, Claire picks up her phone and presses the necessary buttons. She resigns herself to a future remorse, knowing that it is, it really is, the best of a terrible set of choices. In the end it is the best choice for everyone. She stands there, in the empty room, not yet certain of what she will say, waiting for a voice to come on the line.

Day breaks as they approach the city limits. Light begins to fill the car, a thick, heavily colored early-morning light. It is perverse that another day will begin as usual – that everyone in this city, most of whom haven't yet broken from sleep, will simply put on clothes, have breakfast, listen to the weather and traffic reports, converge in the ordinary way. The thought oppresses him. He shakes violently. It starts within, the plucking of individual nerves, like the testing, one by one, of a piano's wires, and then sprawls outward until at last it seems to be an external sensation, delirious and brutal. 'Do you want me to pull over? Should I stop the car?' The voice is his brother's. Ben, if anything, stands to lose more than Paul; underneath his words, in a low current, is a strain of desperation, a sticky throb of regret. The wish to unravel the knitted inevitability of present circumstance. How did a man, Ben must be wondering, with a kind of amazed anguish, how did a man, with as much stake in the wide, waking world as he has, consent to participate in such an undertaking? Paul shakes his head in response to the question. He looks past his brother and watches the rising sun. It is fully above the horizon now but hanging tentatively, as if fearful that at any moment the darkness might reappear and beat it back down into its coffin.

They drive on in silence, the brothers. The city is already visible, those first dark crops of housing projects, and they press forward, toward its heart. Soon they will be engulfed. The churn of the metropolis will absorb them completely. Later, when Paul is alone again, the hard weight will return. He has performed the act which most appalls him: he's taken a life. Even now it sits within him like a tumor, embedded, unremovable. Doctors and priests each practice their own methods of surgery but neither offers what Paul's situation calls for. He looks at Ben, who doesn't return the glance, and whose face has a restored rigidity. It is the same, strong collection of features Paul has always known.

He looks at himself in the car's side mirror and finds that the face there, his own, is also the same as yesterday's. But there is a change, both mental and deeply material; he senses it with a fine intuition of self. His skin is starched with a film of dry sweat. He'd like a shower, but what would be clean? His discomfort has no remedy; he belongs now to an entirely different class of people. He can't remember ever having been so fiercely aware of his own being – of the adjustment of a wrist, the small texture of skin, the pressure between two dry lips. He's never been more certain of the fact that he exists.

Ben drives faster, anxious to be done with this errand, and his eyes, under a beveled brow, indicate an absorption with his own thoughts. Even as he speculates about what those might be, Paul has trouble staying awake – everything in him is weary and sore, and for the first time in hours, though it seems like days and months, nothing is demanded of him; he drifts off. At a word from his brother, he comes to. Buoyant from the lightheadedness that follows a tatter of sleep, a sort of benign, startled curiosity, Paul asks what he has been thinking.

The city expands, filling the windshield, and Ben doesn't respond immediately; he simply watches. 'Nothing,' he says at last. 'Just something about Dad. Something that happened before you were born.'

Staring elsewhere, Paul goes to make a reply, then decides against it; he isn't quite sure what he would have said. Instead he sits next to his brother, not speaking, a silence crossing through silence, into the approaching city and its consuming grandeur. As it grows they shrink. The hour is still early, before the wild and uncertain heartbeat, the return to life, that morning brings: the closely huddled buildings of Manhattan have a severe, sacred dignity. They don't pretend to house God. But they too speak of the need – greater than vanity, graver than ambition – to be of use: the need not to be nothing. Sunlight, stronger now, burns behind them, and the city flames into brilliant silhouette. Everywhere, everywhere they rise, these structures of terrifying endurance, these towers that slice apart the sky. These cathedrals that everywhere men build.

It's as simple as this – without their wisdom, intelligence, love, guidance, and unwavering belief, this book would not now exist: Samantha Holmes, Uzodinma Iweala, Jamaica Kincaid, and Chris Parris-Lamb.

I would also like to thank my editors, Stuart Williams and Alexis Washam, for their tremendous, patient work on my behalf, as well as my U.K. agent, Caspian Dennis.