Heathern (10 page)

"Plus the floor upstairs. They call it a duplex but it's
enough for thirty. It's Thatcher's place, really. A gift until
he wants it back."

The previous owners favored the sort of decor that
resulted in its having appeared in expensive journals, years
before. Most of the rooms were the width of the house,
divided by walls painted in Navaho white and floored with
blond wood. Lester wandered through the living room, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the furniture, and
studied an abstract I had hanging above the fireplace.
Looking anew into its painted swirls I wondered how my
friend had known what angels swarmed over heaven.

"It's called 'Driven to Pieces in Pursuit of Love,"' I said.
"A girlfriend of mine painted it. She did a number of works
that no one ever bought. Except this one."

"It's awful dark," he said. "She did this recently?"

It was dark; the angels smothered in vast clouds of dust,
tumbling wing over wing as they spiraled into the deep.
"She bought a factory loft in Tribeca," I said. "Her fiance
came down to see the place. She stepped into the elevator to
take him up to the roof to show him, but the elevator wasn't
there."

"I'm sorry," Lester said.

"She'd be even unhappier now than she was then," I
said. "You want a drink?"

"Bourbon'd be good," he said. "A little one."

"I wouldn't want to corrupt."

"Don't worry," he said. We entered my apartment's Food
Preparation/Interpersonal Interaction Core; here the designers had so unyieldingly followed a black and white
pattern in both fixture and wall that, entering the room, one
felt to have fallen into a crossword puzzle. There were
burners and microwaves and convection ovens; cabinets
and blenders and gadgets enough to supply large restaurants. In a cabinet I kept one knife, one fork, one spoon, and
two plates.

"I've never seen a refrigerator this large," he said, staring
at its bulk; Bulganin refrigerators were the finest made, I'd
heard, but I suppose Russians understood ice. It was large
enough to hold half a steer. "Entertain much?"

I poured our drinks into the two glasses I kept ready for
socializing. "Bernard tells me I more often depress." When
I handed Lester his bourbon he took small sips, as if drinking too rapidly might sear shut his mouth. "Strong
enough?"

"I don't drink much," he said, sitting on a black stool,
leaning against a white countertop. "I don't see what got
him so interested in me. It's not as if I just started doing
this."

"I have no idea," I said. "I think he thinks he can use you
to intimidate."

"Intimidate who?"

"A limitless number of candidates."

"Seems he sees too many squirrels in the trees," said
Lester. "What does he think I am, anyway?"

"It should be obvious," I said. "It was obvious; he only
wanted to hear me say it. "He thinks that if you're not the
messiah, he can use you as such."

"To intimidate," Lester said, smiling, not appearing happy. He ran his fingertip around his glass's rim as if to make
it sing.

"He's been playing it cagey. He's impossible to figure out
after a point, he doesn't even tell his wife what he's up
to-

"Would it be more to my advantage to be the messiah or
to pretend to be the messiah?"

"Same difference," I said. "He'll keep working on you."

"She seems preoccupied with something besides me," he
said. "What else is going on that might tie in to his plans?"

"A member of our organization was murdered without
our consent," I said. "He's already decided who's guilty,
and you never know what the punishment'll be until-"

"Murdered?" Lester said.

"It's business," I said. "What do you expect?"

"That's why you were so afraid," he said. "When you
thought somebody was shooting at us."

I nodded.

"Then he's meeting a Japanese representative on Tues day. Bernard's cooked up some treaty of alignment. Thatcher isn't keen to go along. He tends to see connections where
none exist, and I think he's seeing a connection between the
murder and the alignment. The Drydens are dysfunctional
unless they're lurching from crisis to crisis-"

"Then sometime I might wind up as part of a connection
too?" Lester asked.

For several moments I stared into my drink's melting ice,
gazing into smooth translucence as if to read the future; saw
nothing that comforted or disturbed. "You might. I might.
You never can tell."

"That must make for uncertainty ..."

I nodded. "Once he gets his paws on you he'll adhoc it for
awhile, until something gets rolling. Figure he'll set his
sights low to start."

"It's good to have low expectations," said Lester. "Messianic hopes are the worst kind. He's bound to be disappointed."

"He doesn't like to be disappointed," I said. "Show him
the angels. That'd shut him up."

"He couldn't see them," said Lester. "Not even if he
wanted to. Are you sorry you saw them?"

"I'm not sorry," I said. "I'm not glad."

"They were glad to see you."

"Must be pretty boring up there, then," I said, standing
and rinsing my glass in the sink; pondering for an instant if I
should fix myself another one before picking up the bottle,
and pouring again. "I'm sure Bernard'll be stuck with the
details, if you were to go along. He always has to tie up the
loose ends."

"What do people expect of a messiah?" Lester asked.
"People in general, I mean. What do you think?"

"How should I know? It's nothing I've ever thought
about," I said. "Somebody to clean up the mess, I suppose.
Bring about a better world. Cure disease, rebuild cities,
sweep the streets." My soul's Bernard eased out again before I felt it breaking the surface; I barely contained my
laugh as I enumerated. "Wash the dishes, fix the sink, make
the bed--

"People can do those things," said Lester. "The big
things and the small."

"But they won't. They don't even try anymore. Too afraid
they'll fail, I suppose, and so they stop caring, or pretending
to care-"

"As I understand it," said Lester, "They love us most
when we try and fail."

"Lessens the competition," I said. "It'll never happen in
any event, so there's no point discussing it." I marveled at
how manipulative I could be; watched his face to see what
reaction might appear there. It wasn't that I was drunk, for I
wasn't; I only wanted to test him as he seemed to be forever
testing me.

"The messiah will come," he said. "Not the one anybody
wants or expects."

A memory rose up in my mind; I saw again the books in
my parents' den, their books and the dusty volumes passed
down from my mother's grandfather, shoved into the
highest shelves, unread for years. One afternoon when I
was thirteen I remembered climbing up and poking around,
seeing what I might find there. He was a rabbi; most of his
old books were in Hebrew and I could never read those.
Some were in English, and I recalled coming across a
paragraph concerning Waldo Frank as I idly flipped pages,
the dust rising, steam from a lone riders' white donkey.
Frank believed that when the messiah came the messiah
would come as a woman; it occurred to me what an
unfathomable, yet charming concept that seemed. The rest
of the book was drier than the dust that covered it; I
replaced it on the shelf, and ran outside to soak up sunlight
and let the wind blow the dust from my skin.

"How do They feel about the messiah?" I asked. "Have
They told you?"

"They know that when the messiah comes They'll reunite, but They don't know what'll happen after that. They
know that everything will change, but They don't know
how, and so They've never been in any rush-"

"So They'll keep putting it off."

"It's almost time," he said. "They've had all Their doubts
confirmed, at this point. It must give Them pause. You could
say the messiah's Their doomsday device."

Picking up the CD's remote I switched on the radio,
tuned as always to WNEW-AM; "Highway 61" rang out
through the apartment's speakers, and I quickly switched it
off.

"Want another drink?" I asked; he shook his head. "Want
to see the rest of the place?"

As we walked through I showed him the backyard
garden, the dining room, the two bathrooms on the first
floor. Pictures of my parents hung on the stairway's wall,
and he examined them.

"You favor your mother," he said. The shot he saw was
taken on their twentieth anniversary, when she was a year
younger than I was then.

"She colored her hair," I said. "She went gray early on."

"They live in town?"

I preserved what remained of them: odd pieces of small
furniture, some books, my dishes; a family album, images
trapped in black and white amber. My father stood in Penn
Station's iron greenhouse with his fellow soldiers in those
old photos; my mother skipped rope on Pitkin Avenue, in
Brooklyn, in long-erased Brownsville. Sometimes I found
photos of myself that I couldn't recall being taken, shots
where my color was grayed by distance and time, and I
looked no more than a child hired for an ephemeral event.
For so long I remembered my dreams so much more clearly
than I remembered my past.

"They're dead," I told him. "I grew up in Short Hills, in
Jersey. They sold the house a few years after Dad retired."

He'd bought it for ten thousand, sold it for seven
hundred thousand; were I to have repurchased it myself,
that day, I would have paid the same number of dollars as
he paid but the cost would have been so much greater. It
was a comfortable house, near the arboretum and the train
station; in those woods I knew my first boys. In the
backyard was a gas grill, layered with the ash and soot of a
thousand barbecues; I remembered staring into its flames as
a child, thinking how cool those icy blue feathers looked.

"I guess they were old ..."

"They were young," I said. "They moved to a retirement
community. In Florida. After the revaluation they lost their
savings. They couldn't afford the maintenance on their
co-op and they got an eviction notice. I didn't know until
later. They must not have wanted me to worry, and I never
thought-"

"Joanna, it's all right ..."

"Let's go upstairs," I said. He preceded me on the ascent.
The second floor's vacuums were broken, and dust settled
over us as might sea-mist at the shore. "They didn't tell me.
It was such a-"

"Joanna?"

"Such a-" I began again, unable to think of a suitable
conclusion.

"Are you all right?"

"Fine," I said. "I'm fine. They were fine. Their lives went
so smoothly. Too smoothly. I'd learned not to worry about
them."

"Joanna, it wasn't your fault, whatever happened-"

"I should have been there," I said, stopping, leaning
against the wall; I'd not let myself think about it since it
happened. They'd decided upon their course of action with
the logic they brought to all situations; decided to kill
themselves, and so obtained poison from a reliable source.
"Why didn't they tell me?"

"Joanna, it's all right," he said, holding me as if to keep me from shaking. Every Saturday night they fixed a candlelight dinner for themselves, once I was old enough that I
might make my own arrangements. I remembered so often
leaving the house, seeing them sitting there, staring into
each other's eyes as if they'd been married the day before.
Perhaps, that night, they'd hoped to draw such romance as
they could from their final tableau; more likely the electricity had been cut off, and they needed candlelight in order to
measure out their doses. A candle caught the bedroom
drapes on fire, the fire department said; they'd passed out
before blowing out the lights.

"I didn't know," I said. Mom could have slept through it;
Dad got halfway across the living room. "The fire department sent me a bill for their services the next day on the fax.
That's how I found out-"

"It's all right," Lester repeated, not letting me go. "It's all
right. Go ahead and cry-"

"I can't," I said. "I haven't been able to in years. Not
really."

They wanted their ashes sprinkled over Coney Island,
where they'd met. Early one morning, the next week, Avi
drove me out to the beach and stood guard to make sure no
one else came near. I walked out to the surf; almost jabbed
my foot on a needle. The wind was blowing; I tried to wait
until it settled, but a gust came along as I let go of the ashes
and they blew back onto the beach, mixing with the gray
sand until I couldn't tell where they'd gone.

"You're crying now," he said; they ran down my cheeks.

"No-"

"You are-"

"Not really," I said. "Come on," I said, pulling away from
him, wiping my face dry. "I'm sorry. Let's go on. Up here."

At the top of the stairs we turned, and walked down a
short hall. "This is my bedroom," I said as we walked in,
seeing my bed, my dresser and the television as I'd left
them. When I turned on the lights I turned on the set as well, hoping that something distracting might be playing. A
commercial was on; to sell watches the narrator quoted the
second law of thermodynamics as an old Otis Redding song
drifted over the images of women nearly nude and dyed
blue. I couldn't deal with such neopost so late, and turned it
off.

"Better?" he asked. I nodded. "You have a beautiful
home."

"Thatcher has a beautiful home," I said. "I didn't mean to
get so upset. It's just-"

"I shouldn't have brought it up," he said, touching my
face. "Don't worry. Everything's all right."

"I haven't been able to cry for so long," I said, sitting on
the bed. "I was all dried up. It hurt too much to feel so
much. I couldn't. I'm sorry-"

"You can cry around me," he said. "Joanna, there's
nothing wrong in that-"

"I haven't cried since that last night with Avi," I said.
"Not since then. Thatcher'll never see me cry."