City of Strangers (4 page)

'Look. Why don't you just go and leave him with me? I live right here. I'll make sure he gets home. We can all forget this ever happened.'

He has offered an exit, a way to save face, by suggesting that they've proved their point, which feels like a betrayal of principle: it concedes that they have a point, that until now their actions have been perfectly reasonable. It makes him complicit, somehow. Under the close-cut cap of pale hair, almost white in this light, the man's face makes an expression of mild amusement. Paul would have preferred to issue a stronger, a categorical, denunciation, not to surrender to the terror mounting within him. But it is there, terror, and it isn't going away. Nor are they.

'He's just a kid,' Paul says, directing his words at the presumed leader. He adds, as an afterthought: 'Someone has certainly called the police by now. You're making an awful lot of noise. I could hear you three blocks away.'

They make no response. With each subsequent statement, each new effort to reason with these men, he senses the mounting futility of it; at each word they are more rooted to the spot, more invested in their brutal act. Something in his chest swells, as if his body is suddenly too small to contain what's inside. Sweat stipples the skin of his face even in the cold, and because of the cold it stings; but inside he is hot, and hurricanes of blood churn between his bones and spin out to the ends of his arms.

The nearer man looks back for instruction and at this cue his partner, clearly the author of this event, opens his mouth at first merely to grin, knotting up the skin of his face like a gargoyle's, and then, with a great smoky breath, he laughs. Soon they're both laughing, these two men, whose white faces emerge vividly from the night behind them.

Through the laughter one of them says, 'Man, don't be an idiot – fuck off,' and everything begins to happen very quickly: something surges through Paul like electricity: the key feels hot in his hand, tight between the knuckles. Talk is useless. He throws a punch at the near man, and though it lands on target he didn't set his feet, he's off balance, and the motion feels horribly unnatural, an imitation of something he once saw. It has the desired effect – the man staggers back – but the other is already closing in. He attempts another crooked punch and this time pays the price: his grip on the key loosens. The man's jaw pushes it back into his hand, and the whole key chain falls to the sidewalk with a weak splash.

First the one, and then both, attack him. He doesn't know how many times he's struck, as his consciousness telescopes away from his senses, the hard, dull blows railing his body from front and back and accumulating in a flat, wooden pain that spreads through his side, under his ribs, warm and uneven; his legs buckle, the sky tilts swiftly away from him at a fierce angle, and the sidewalk flies up to receive the back of his skull. Even his mouth registers the impact – a zinc flavor coating his tongue from root to tip, a flavor like the admission of defeat. For an instant his mind closes, everything shutting down, turning to black. He's aware only of the pavement beneath him, the distinct unnatural feeling of lying on a plane of such hard stuff. Above him the men's voices are muffled.

'Who is he?'

'He's a dumb fuck, that's what he is.'

Paul's head clears, and they sense it; they look down. A moment passes in which nothing happens, a slice of possibility: they may be content with just this, Paul lying on the ground and humiliated but without serious injury. He waits. One of the two men – the leader, he's certain of it – comes toward him, and before Paul can trace the path of the boot he feels it in his ribs, a sharp wedge of pain, the impact ringing through stiff limbs. He feels terribly fragile; his fingertips feel hollow. Almost immediately, the man delivers another kick of the same force and trajectory, and with a groan Paul rolls away, onto his other side.

No one's in a hurry to leave; they laugh. The men have settled in once more, adapting to the idea of distributing their violence across two victims instead of just the one. They have ugly faces, with heavy jaws and cheeks blasted red by the weather, full of bleak brutality. Maybe this began as an idle amusement, but it has become a piece of business that must be brought to an end.

They are rolling Paul onto his back, almost coddling him, treating him for the moment like the injured creature he is. This is new to him, the grammar of violence, these small intermissions used to emphasize the cruelty. His bones ache. Do they plan now to kill him? He is defenseless; the muscles in his legs flatten on the ground like wet sand. The chance remains that these men know a boundary. Even in the haze of drink and violence they may still respect the bright line between beating a man and killing him. There's no telling. Then the leader, with the menace legible on his face, lifts his leg and clamps a boot firmly down on Paul's neck.

One good push would do it – crush his windpipe, put an end to everything. The man doesn't give it. Not yet. Paul summons the strength to lift his arms and take hold of the man's ankle, but he can't do much from this position and makes no effort to throw off the leg; the determination isn't there. Instead he merely holds it, like a child clinging with both hands to his mother's arm.

'How's that? Comfortable?'

The man's speech is self-consciously tough: his words are part of the posture he uses to keep his lieutenant in line.

'You cut my friend. Don't you see what you did to him?'

'Didn't you hear him? Terence told you look at my face.'

But he can't: no part of him can move. He hears the metallic rip of a zipper's teeth and then the gentle cackle of urine splashing on pavement. His nose fills with its warm, animal smell.

'Maybe he's sorry now. Are you? Are you sorry for trying to help your terrorist friend?'

He begins to increase the pressure on Paul's neck. Bright, urgent flashes appear at the edges of his vision. He pushes his nails into the man's legs but through thick denim the gesture is meaningless. The pissing stops, and the voices above him grow faint. He gurgles.

Glass shatters near his ear. The other man has dropped his bottle only inches from Paul's face. The crude aroma of malt liquor mixes with the urine and swims into his nose while his hands rattle the ankle like a broken doorknob before falling away to flop pointlessly against the rough asphalt. As he floats closer to darkness, the back of his hand brushes something unexpected, a quick, light prick. Pain has become a single idea – the weight of the boot – and to discover it elsewhere is startling, perverse. His hand turns to examine the object: smooth, cold, and deeply curved in the middle, like a shell. Glass from the broken bottle. Paul scoops it into his fingers and brings his hands back around the man's ankle. This earns another smirk. He slips the glass between the fabric of the pants and the bare leg, inching up the long, inviting bulge of calf and then trowels it under the skin, using his thumb for leverage. He forces it in as far as he can and with all his remaining strength drags down. It sickens him, opening this gash in the man's leg: he doesn't use a sawing motion, as he would for tough meat, and the flexed muscle resists its passage; the irregular edge of the glass stutters through flesh, a dense, grisly tremble between his fingers, but he doesn't stop, even as he feels the opposite edge pierce his own skin, he ignores the pain, continuing to press and pull, even as he feels a warm dribble of blood.

Several things happen at once. The foot lifts from Paul as the man, howling, leaps and then staggers away. His accomplice, panicked and unsure what has happened, takes a few running steps from the scene, as if Paul has unleashed a hidden power. Air explodes into his lungs as he gasps and wrestles it in; a dry retch rises from his stomach. For a moment the leader looks unsure whether to follow his partner. Paul still lies on the ground, but he's proven to be less than ideal prey, capable of biting back. Then, as if suddenly realizing the extent of his injury, the man's face crumples in agony. At first he limps around, and then with a cramped, graceless haste he chases his friend into the darkness.

Paul groans. The pain in his throat begins immediately to diminish, though he still struggles to breathe. He coughs and spits, trying to evacuate the salty taste of blood, and then, as he sits up, a damp ache spreads across his back and shoulders. He places a hand on his ribs where he was kicked – nothing seems broken. Already he realizes what he has escaped. He won't even need to go to the hospital.

The boy is already on his feet. The moment does not have the sense of rushed camaraderie that shared traumas are said to bring about. Rather, the kid has a defensive, angled stance; tension constricts his battered face, a tender unrest upon the smooth features, a murmur in the skin. There's no gratitude in it. In the cold, the blood around his nose has already dried to a black crust, and he seems to be waiting for instruction from Paul. The adult. The samaritan. Paul does not feel any more certain of the appropriate course of action. It's the boy who fixes the point. He turns and, without a word, runs. In a matter of strides he sheds the punishment his body just endured. Paul hasn't got the energy to call after him and doesn't know what he would say if he did. He wonders what causes the boy to flee now, after the threat has passed, and then sees what might have done it: in his right hand he still holds the large shard of glass, and even in bad light it plainly shows the stains of its recent use.

By morning bruises have blossomed across his ribs. They have the sheen and deep color of rotting plums and hurt to the touch. The cuts on his hand weren't deep – scabs already cover them – but there is a long red welt on his throat, above the collar, which hasn't diminished at all. He worries that the man's boot broke something under the skin that will never heal.

It is Monday. Paul has a meeting with a book editor who contacted him about an unspecified project. He would prefer to remain in isolation, and feels an arthritic reluctance to rejoin the outside world. For an hour before leaving he sits in his apartment in a state of mental exhaustion; even to think he must contend with the massive headache which, rising up like an iceberg, greeted him almost at the instant of consciousness and split apart the watery half-dreams that flicker between sleep and waking. Last night's multiple events compete for a claim to his attention. Only hours ago he was pinned to the pavement, as close to death as he has ever come, although there's no way to know if they intended to go through with it – with killing him – or if they had already reached their threshold when his hand found the piece of glass. He was in such pain. Unaccustomed to violence, he perhaps wouldn't have known the difference between pain that kills and pain that doesn't. Regardless, he feels glad, almost proud, to have done it – to have located, in a time of need, this resourceful solution. Paul fondles the secret like a new acquisition, and from it, from this isolated incident framed safely in the past, he receives an unexpected, pleasurable jolt; momentarily he forgets Claire. His thoughts are tinged with a pale madness – he feels wild to have survived such a thing, and his heart boils in a residue of adrenaline. The sensation is like nothing he's ever known; he can sense in it an addictive strength. What raw, extra ordinary violence his hands are capable of. It will be strange to re surface in a world that knows nothing of what happened.

He dresses, choosing a cream-colored shirt, sports coat, blue jeans, and unpolished brown shoes, an ensemble that Claire, with gentle condescension, used to call his writer's costume – even if, as she was quick to admit, she thought he looked handsome in it. It was one of their jokes. He stifles another memory of last night's pleasureless sex, of the vacant expression on Claire's face as he came, and finishes putting on his clothes. It's difficult, anyway, to remember what he would like to remember: the lights stayed off the whole time. Last week, on the phone, the editor – a man called Bentham – insisted that Paul would want to see him, but was stubbornly unforthcoming about what he had in mind. Paul imagines it must be ghostwriting, something of that sort. He stands at the bathroom mirror, playing with his collar, which, no matter how he adjusts it, doesn't conceal the dark welt on his neck. This meeting could mean work, yet he isn't looking forward to it, not because of nerves, but because conversation with a stranger, the recital of banalities, is a chore. He isn't used to it. His time is his, alone.

He surfaces in midtown, rising into the sudden crush of activity, the pageant of matching men and women, precisely dressed, who march against the wind – ties flapping, skirts pressed around knees – while jawing into mobile phones and tapping on small electronic screens. He walks quickly, crossing a square as pigeons the size of footballs waddle stupidly out of the way. There's no reason to hurry – he is in fact a little early for the meeting at Bentham's office, near the top of a forty-story tower on Madison Avenue. It looms suddenly as he turns onto the block. Stacked against the sky, such buildings reliably impress Paul, a testament to exactly the sort of ambition he does not possess: calling it greed is reductive, even though it's exactly the word he would once have used. Another of the conservative compromises of age, this lexical tempering, this revision of self. Ten o'clock. People step out for the first cigarette of the morning. Knotted in cliques of two and three, they speak in voices too low for Paul to hear.

Weekdays are strange. Fresh out of college he worked as a reporter but after three years decided that he preferred to be on his own. Since then Paul hasn't held a proper nine-to-five. His intention may once have been to chase a life that was more glamorous. He took a few stabs at writing a novel, including the one last year, but nothing ever came together in a way he liked, and before meeting Claire he left New York to do graduate study at the University of Chicago, reading for a thesis on the postwar Central European writers; it didn't pan out, and a year later he was back. With time these urges have grown small, then fallen away altogether. The life he's built for himself – modest, self-contained, and, yes, with a kind of freedom – makes the best use of his natural talents: he writes, editors solicit articles from him, and he's built a healthy catalog of bylines, even if a more enduring success has eluded him. His aspirations now have implicit boundaries. He no longer feels – if indeed he ever really did – the gnaw of ambition, that desire for greatness that constrains some men like the iron rings of a wine cask. When money gets tight he takes jobs he wouldn't otherwise – copywriting, proofreading, freelance editing – but he reminds himself that it is a small price to live without a fixed place of business and have no one to whom he must answer.

The result of his lifestyle is that, when he steps into the street in the middle of the day, he feels foreign, even a little criminal. Adults are supposed to be at work, in offices, factories, fields; he isn't.

Bentham meets him just outside the elevator. He is shorter, older, and rounder than Paul, yet projects an energy his visitor cannot match. His collar is open. Stylish, wire-rimmed eyeglasses attest to an attention to the trimmings of his profession. He bounces a look off Paul's face as they shake hands.

'I was sorry to hear about your father's health.'

'You know my father?'

'Not personally,' says Bentham. 'Word gets around.'

He ushers Paul into his office, where the smell of expensive things – leather, cologne, high-quality paper – immediately pinches his nose. Nothing wears any age. On the desk stands a menagerie of emaciated metallic sculpture, arranged to articulate unassuming elegance, an impression further embellished by the subdued abstract art that hangs on the walls. Books line the shelves, as straight and neat as good teeth.

'Close shave?'

Paul doesn't at first understand that the question refers to the abrasion on his neck. He makes a vague remark about a fall on some ice; Bentham lets it drop. Instead he compliments him on an article he recently published in
New York
magazine on the long gestation of the proposed Second Avenue subway line; Paul listens without offering a reply. If Bentham believes that a small dose of such attention will impress him, he's misjudged his audience. Perhaps if Paul were accustomed even to a trickle of regular acclaim these days, his appetite for the stuff would be stronger; speaking to an actual reader of his has become so rare an event that praise has acquired a peculiar, not entirely pleasing flavor.

'Have you ever thought of doing a book?'

In reply Paul makes a gesture that says,
Who hasn't?

'Any ideas at the moment?'

'Do you want to hear them?'

Bentham pauses, considering his next words. He smiles at Paul, a smile that is meant to be ingratiating, and asks: 'What do they pay you, Paul? How much for a word?'

He holds a neutral expression, makes no reply.

'Professional curiosity.'

Finally, deciding there's no harm in it, Paul mentions a number.

'How would you like to make a lot more than that?'

At first Paul simply laughs. Bentham doesn't smile. He is serious. Paul has, until this moment, been baffled as to what this man could have in mind, but now wonders how he missed it. 'You want me to write about my father.'

'Yes.'

'I won't.'

'Hear me out. This would be entirely your book, to take in whatever direction you'd like. The fact is, there are a lot of readers to be reached on the memoir shelf these days. I've done a little reading about your father. We think there's a market for your story.'

'My story's nothing.'

'Your father's, I mean.'

'How do you even know about it?'

'Your brother. I've been reading the articles; one of them mentioned your father. Frank Metzger. Nothing's been written about him for decades, it seems. I looked up a few things. He had quite a life. And of course I remembered your name. You're a talented writer. Maybe you just haven't had a big enough subject.'

Paul exhales sharply. 'I'm afraid you have the wrong idea. I was born in 1969. My father wasn't anybody then. Even if I were interested . . . everything you'd want me to write about, I wouldn't be able to. I wasn't even alive.'

'No one remembers your father, and I wouldn't have heard of him if it weren't for your brother's current – predicament. But it's a unique story, a great hook. It just needs a personal angle. What makes this a viable project is what you bring to it. You're the son. You've got the name.'

'You're asking the wrong person. I've got no interest, and, even if I had, I wouldn't know where to begin.'

'Paul. This could be a big book. You'd really say no to that?'

'I'm willing to.'

'Think of it as a chance to address his critics. To tell his – to tell
your
side of the story.'

'I'm not sure I have a side of the story.'

That smile again: like a leopard's.

'All I'm asking is that you think about it,' the editor says. 'Forget about the money for a minute. Think of what this does for you as a writer. You don't even have an agent. With this under your belt, all of a sudden you're getting more offers for magazine work than you know what to do with. You've got a second book on the way. Just think about it. It's all history now. The dead don't complain.'

Or the nearly dead, thinks Paul. He says, 'My father thought he was being a patriot. He wanted to be more import ant than he was, and he believed he was going to change history. He was young. He was misguided.'

'Most people would use stronger language than that.'

'I'm not trying to defend him. Look, it's difficult already, knowing the man he once was. I haven't got the slightest interest in dwelling on it any more than I already have.'

Bentham maintains an imperious detachment. He stands. Seeing him framed by the impressive office, by the material evidence of his profession and his taste, Paul feels outgunned. The refusals have done nothing to diminish Bentham's glow of assurance. One way or another, he clearly believes, Paul will see the logic of the offer.

'If you change your mind, call me,' says Bentham. 'I've even thought of a title.'

Curiosity gets the better of him; at the door he stops to look at Bentham. He waits. The editor lowers his voice.

'
The American Nazi
.'

In the elevator Paul feels an angry desire to expel from memory Bentham's last words. To spit them out. He hasn't got the luxury of silence and time to consider what has been asked of him, to sort through the annoyance and shame he feels. He is expected elsewhere, and quite soon – in the space of half an hour he must hurry back to the train, descend, switch lines, emerge again in Brooklyn, and then walk the several blocks to the funeral home that will manage the care of his father's body once it is beyond the help of doctors and nurses. He touches the welt on his neck, which is warm and has begun to itch. He's spoken once already with the mortician to arrange the business of his father's funeral. Questions concerning the expected number of guests proved especially difficult: there perhaps exist people of whom Paul is unaware and who have reason to come – but as far as he knows the number in attendance, besides himself, will be zero.

He walks as fast as he can. There are people to avoid, both the hard-walking businessmen and the oblivious tourists, there are trash cans, street vendors, mailboxes, parking meters. There are dog leashes stretched like trip wires, doors swinging suddenly open. Delivery boys on bicycles bounding onto the sidewalk. Lampposts and fat black garbage bags piled like dung heaps. But the mind is agile, annoyingly so, and it can perform its physical responsibilities, ushering the body through even a cluttered space while operating on other frequencies. It is the source of the will, but the will has little control over it. In direct affront to his staunch and bilious reaction to the editor, Paul, in the back of his mind, finds himself knocking together sentences and paragraphs: he is writing.

Frank Metzger, the son of German immigrants, was twenty-four when Hitler came to power. He was living by himself on the Lower East Side and working at a lawyer's office. His principal ambition was to become a poet. To date, however, that dream was more batter than cake; he thought about poetry much more than he actually wrote it. Up to this point, the story is a familiar one – an early, ill-defined wish for greatness that rattles around inside a young man.

The train arrives. Paul peruses the faces of other passengers and feels his thoughts recede. Across from him sits an elderly woman, already pushed against the back of her life – hair stretched tight by curlers, carefully dressed, somebody's grandmother. From a cavernous blue purse she pulls a thin, thumb-worn booklet titled
The Lord Hears Your Cries
. For twenty minutes, turning the pages with exaggerated delicacy, she recites from it, just under her breath, her lips moving rapidly, as if chewing on each word. She rarely blinks. Her eyes have a child's shine.

Prayer was once important to Paul. For his tenth or eleventh birthday, at an age when one finds tremendous joy in a plot if it offers up a good explanation of things, a friend's mother gave him a volume of children's stories from the Bible, and he was immediately receptive to the dramatic, occasionally gruesome fascination of those tales. He soon graduated to the real thing, whose dense bricks of type and obscure prose only increased its allure – a puzzle to be solved, an intellectual leap of greater, graver daring. He read, and read, and read. His eyes went sore. He was amazed at how full his head now was, at how full it had always been, and amazed that this fullness was completely private. He went warm when he thought of it. This faith was his, and he was newly free; he had found something that was not his father's, that was purely his own. Paul became a believer. He quickly adopted the habits of prayer and penitence, acclimating himself to the sudden reversals of emotion when, during a brief interlude of instinctual pleasure, guilt flew in to sting and infect it. Guilt was good because it wasn't random: it obeyed a set of principles, and with regulated, predictable behavior one could avoid it altogether.