City on Fire (28 page)

This wasn’t to say it was all apocalyptic gloom, his Ziggy Stardust period. When they weren’t crying or monopolizing his parents, he loved having brothers. He loved watching them spit up on different relatives at his bar mitzvah in June (and loved the chance to make Mickey Sullivan as uncomfortable as Mickey’s first communion had made him). And fear of Grandpa aside, he’d always loved French-speaking Montreal, where the Weisbargers went again the following August, squeezing all five of them into the wagon. That was also the year Grandpa started showing him a strange and special solicitude—the winter they snuck off to Radio City.

It was his close hot solitary hours in the basement he would dwell on later, though. Turning the music up loud and stripping naked and watching himself in the mirror hung on his wall among the posters and album covers he’d tacked to the millimeter-thin wood veneer. Despite Mickey’s claim that he himself never did it, that you got seven years in purgatory for each infraction, Charlie couldn’t keep his hands off himself. He pressed his midsection to the mattress and saw big dreamy tits like ice cream bells. He would try to come without touching himself, thinking that might lighten the penalty, but at the last minute his will would give out. Every time, he felt more and more excited and then, suddenly, so ashamed. Which should have been his confirmation that Mickey was right. And the week after the first of David Weisbarger’s two heart attacks, Charlie would realize that the penalty had been visited not upon himself, but upon his father. It was as if each little handful of pearl jelly he brought out of himself had cost seven years of his dad’s life. Or—let’s be honest—seven weeks.

Again, Grandpa had come to stay, though this time it was Dad and not Mom in the hospital, and Charlie stayed home. He preferred Grandpa’s silence to being sent to the Sullivans’, where Mickey was mostly interested these days in lifting weights in the garage. And he preferred either to the hospital and its lunchroomy smell, green beans, bleach, which he now knew to be the smell of death. With the plastic tube running to his nose, like the tubes of Mickey’s older brother’s bong, Dad looked faded, all his color sucked away into the machines. And at night, through the basement ceiling, Charlie heard crying he knew was not the twins’.

THE MONTH AFTER THE FUNERAL, Charlie would feel as if something huge and mechanical was bearing down on him—as if the sky itself was just one dull plate of a vise too vast for him to have noticed it before. As if all the music had gone out of the universe. It was hard to get out of bed in the morning, and hard to keep his head off his desk in second period Chem. Shel Goldbarth and Tall Paul Stein knew his dad had died, of course, and went easy on him, as did anyone whose folks read the paper. To the anonymous jocks and preps, though, he was just the same freak kid. Sorry, they kept calling him. Sorry Wastebucket. He wasn’t about to tell them why he deserved better; he didn’t care, really. What hurt is the way Mickey Sullivan didn’t say anything when they used the name in front of him. The way Mickey had withdrawn his protection.

One night, he went to the kitchen phone and mashed the familiar digits for the Sullivans. Of course, the odds against getting Mickey in his large and intact household were 7 to 1; it was Mickey’s mom who picked up. For a second, Charlie was paralyzed. “Hello?” said a woman who used to cut the crusts off his sandwiches and remove the sweaty yellow square of supermarket cheese he wasn’t allowed to have on his bologna. “Hello?” He hadn’t thought this far ahead. There were the old standbys, refrigerator surveys, Prince Albert in a can, but in this intimate intracranial buzz, they seemed less hilarious than they did at the lunchtable. Plus Grandpa was watching TV in the next room. What was the term? Heavy breathing. He exhaled into the receiver’s mouthpiece, left a fine mist of condensation on the plastic. “Hello? Who is this?” He hung up.

The next night, he got Mr. Sullivan, who said this was not funny at all, that whoever this was, he would find out, and when—

Except it was funny, actually, the way the most random compulsion could become something to live for. The last few periods at school began to lengthen uncomfortably, like a telescope turned the wrong way. The entire day was a narrowing funnel leading to this one moment, just before the hang-up, when the Sullivan on the other end would know it was the Unknown Caller, and know the Unknown Caller knew they knew.

Then one night came the knock on the door. Maybe it was the timing that tipped Charlie off, because no one knocked on the Weisbargers’ door these days except Mormon missionaries or women from Congregation Beth Shalom bearing casserole dishes—it was too sad a house for social calls—and they would not have come at night like this, in the rain. No, this was the other shoe, coming to stomp out his life like a bug’s. He stole upstairs to his old bedroom, now shadowed with cribs and playpens and toy shelves from which stuffed animals watched and disapproved. He dared not turn on the light: it might be seen from the sidewalk below, and he didn’t want to wake the twins. On cat’s feet he made it to the window, lifted the shade. He was too late to see whoever it was on the stoop; he caught only an arc of black nylon, cut off from the rest of its umbrella by the chord of the roofline. It trembled a vigorous accompaniment to words Charlie couldn’t make out. He could hear their melody, rising into frustration. A man’s voice, which was interrupted by another man’s—his grandpa’s. “Why don’t you leave the poor kid alone?”

Grandpa would never mention the visit to Charlie; nor, evidently, to his mother. But the next day at school, Mickey, newly huge, found him near the loading dock behind the cafeteria and silently, dutifully—almost apologetically—pummeled him. And that was the formal end of the friendship.

But was it really the end of the Unknown Caller? Back in the good days, Charlie used to have this intuition that timelines were a fiction. That time seemed like an arrow only because people’s brains were too puny to handle the everything that would otherwise be present. He’d tried to explain it to Mickey once, when they were bullshitting ideas for their own comic book—for parallel universes and so forth, but also for how to fit the simultaneity of things into the relentlessly forward-moving frames. His theory led pretty swiftly to ridicule, but was a private comfort. Now, though, he saw why Mickey might have wanted to defend himself against it. Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you’ve ever tried to outrun. And then how to know—the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table—which you, specifically, is the real one?

UNLESS CHARLIE WANTED TO TAKE THE SCHOOLBUS—and he rode the same route as Mickey—he had to walk the half-mile home. In March on the Island, the ground was still too hard for planting, so the people who were home stayed indoors. Underdressed, because in muzzy post-sleep he’d mistaken the brightness outside the basement for warmth, which anyway wouldn’t have survived the afternoon’s clouding over, he jammed his fists in the pockets of his coat and did his best to lose himself in the empty sidestreets. It was impossible, of course; they were a perfect grid. He passed the ballfield where he’d played pee-wee league, co-sponsored by the Jaycees or Kiwanis or something. When the wind kicked up, the loose cord from the yardarm made a racket against the flagless metal flagpole, an alarm that made his heart tense up like something was about to happen. Which was ridiculous, because what ever happened on Long Island, except people being born and people dying? Still, he decided for once in his life to be a mensch. He hopped the fence and trotted out to right field, blowing on his hands for warmth, and secured the cord to the cleat at the bottom of the pole. Coming back across the dead grass, he stopped. Someone was watching from one of the dugouts.

It was a girl, he realized, when he’d moved close enough to see into the gloom under the tin roof. A tall, slender girl with brown hair to her shoulders. She had on enormous headphones, with an antenna. Her army jacket and the tallboys of beer next to her on the bench could have been a drifter’s, but her posture was pure Amazon. And the voice—the voice, hoarse with cigarettes, absolutely killed him. “Good Samaritan, huh?” She didn’t take off her headphones.

“I just figured that sound must drive the neighbors crazy. I mean, it was driving me crazy. Hey, do you get music on those things?”

“No, I just wear them so strange guys won’t come up and bother me.” She studied him through the diamonds of the fence. “You want a beer?”

He did, if only because she was the one offering, but he told her, truthfully, that he shouldn’t. His mom was part bloodhound.

“You sure? You look like a man who could use one.”

He’d forgotten all about his swollen face. “I fell,” he said. “My name’s Charlie.”

Now he could see quite clearly a Cheshire grin spreading in the shadows behind the fence. “Well, don’t let me keep you, Charlie. I’d only get you in trouble.”

“Right,” he said. “Right,” and made his feet move across the brittle grass, toward the fence he now saw he’d have to climb right in front of her. It trembled under his weight; his jacket snagged for a second on a twist of metal at the top, but miraculously he did not fall.

When he got home, Grandpa was watching TV with the sound off. He didn’t mention Charlie’s lateness, and Mom, apparently, was sleeping, as she often was these days. Still dazed, Charlie sat down in the living room, his swollen eye facing away from the old man. On screen, the camera panned drunkenly across bleachers full of cheering people, zoomed in on an overweight woman who was jumping up and down. At the same time as it advanced the storyline—this woman would become the game show’s next contestant—the sequence conveyed a dense set of messages about luck, fate, prosperity, community. In his old life, Charlie wouldn’t even have registered them. Now they seemed obtrusive, artificial, like the bouncing mass of the woman’s hair, the gauzy orange of her university sweatshirt. Maybe because he was Canadian, Grandpa, in his armchair, didn’t change expression. But when the show cut to commercial, he pushed himself up with a grunt and shuffled to the kitchen. When he came back, he placed in Charlie’s hands a frozen bag. A mound of Eagle Eye shelled peas gleamed on the packaging, more seductive-looking than any real-life pea had ever been. Had something happened to Grandpa’s brain? “For your eye,” he said. “Take the swelling down.”

While Charlie arranged the bag of peas over his tender brow, Grandpa turned the TV off. In the next room, the icebox whirred, replacing the cold air he’d let escape. “Some kid at school does this to you, eh?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did you deserve it?”

“Grandpa, I don’t want to—” Something in the old man’s face stopped him. It was like he was deep inside Charlie, and had been for some time. “Yeah. I pretty much deserved it.”

“And no one stood up for you?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Then you learned something, didn’t you? Now next time someone asks you what happened, if you’re all right, you say, ‘You should see the other guy.’ ”

“You should see the other guy.”

“But confident. With a smile. Like your face might break open.”

“You should see the other guy.”

20

ARRIVING AT THE PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL in July of 1975 with his cardboard suitcase in one hand and his letter from the Wenceslas-Mockingbird School for Girls in the other, Mercer felt divided as to how long he might stay in New York. Even before the letter he’d been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South. He’d told himself—at night in his childhood bedroom, with its too-small bed and its clutch of overdue books on the nightstand—that the tension between the two was insupportable, that he must flee or, like the purer products of America, go crazy. He’d pictured himself how many times snapping shut his typewriter case, binding up his meager pile of manuscript pages, standing out by the highway with his thumb jerked north. It was just as plausible, though, that it was the divisions keeping him sane—his waking life excusing the impossibility of his dream-life, and vice versa. Had his former Shakespeare professor not invited him to come up like this for a job interview, he might still be back there in the bedroom he’d outgrown, turning his paper hat in his hands, the most literate short-order cook in northeastern Georgia.

He’d showed the letter to his mother first, in a kind of dry run, and watched her mouth purse as if he’d served her a slice of cake she knew to be poisoned. “You don’t know anyone in New York,” she’d said finally, but he was out ahead of her. He knew Professor Runcible, for one, and C.L. had an army buddy who had a spare room in his rent-controlled apartment. And hadn’t she wanted to be a teacher once herself, before she fell for Pop? “I’m twenty-three years old, Mama. There’s no guarantee I land a position, but I ought to at least go up there and talk to the man.”

In Shakespeare, tragedy was the flame struck from the clash of moral principles; here her maternal desire to see him meaningfully employed warred with her Old Testament mistrust of cities. Her lips pursed tighter. “I suppose it’s only polite. But you’ll have to ask your father.” Which would turn out, as he feared, to be another order of drama altogether.

Afterward, in the mothball heat of his bedroom under the eaves, he tried to convince himself it was Pop he was running from, or C.L., or the cultural drought of the little town whose distant water tower he could see from his window. Or that he dreamed of New York because it was where the saviors of his youth had hung out. Melville and James Baldwin and especially Walt Whitman. But Pop obviously suspected him of having other motives, which Mercer couldn’t quite put out of his mind, or see.

Next morning, he was boarding a Greyhound bus, on a thirty-dollar See America Pass. Through day and into evening he rode with his legs folded into the cramped space of the window seat, a back-broken paperback of The Age of Innocence propped against them, his brown suit laid out carefully on the rack above. Clearly, his chief weakness as a novelist heretofore had been his inability to keep pace with the complexity of real life. To imagine, for example, that the triumph his fugitive hero would feel at the pine forests whooshing past and the taillights of his countrymen strung out jewellike ahead might be tempered by an equally exquisite guilt. Or, on a purely physical level, by discomfort. With the sun still out, it was too hot, but when night fell, Mercer got cold. No matter how wide the window went, the bus smelled like the rotting carpets of the coloreds-only motel rooms of his distant childhood. He read and slept but mostly stared through the glass and tried not to make eye contact with the passengers alighting serially on the seat beside him: a bantamweight old farmer on a hemorrhoid pillow, an ex-con picked up at the gates of a jail, a Jehovah’s Witness in support hose who from midnight to two a.m. read audibly from a marked-up Bible. That he could hear her wasn’t an accident, he was pretty sure; she wanted his immortal soul. But she disembarked in D.C., and the seat remained blessedly empty until the bus pulled into the blasted parking lot of a minimall somewhere in New Jersey.