Heathern (3 page)

"I hate this place," she said. "These animals."

"Can't isolate yourself all the time, darlin'," he said.
"Look at poor old Elvis. It's the courtiers kill the king."

"Fuck Elvis," she said. "Look at you. Mister man of the
people. Some man."

"Some people." Something brushed my foot; I jerked it
away, having seen rats in better places. Beneath oak beams,
amid tankards and pewter and steel engravings were hundreds at drudgeful play. A post-teen broker barked, crawling on his fours, his tie sweeping the floor; two women
armwrestled, their flowcharts forgotten, keeping their
sneakered feet firm against their chairs as each struggled to
toss the other; I-bankers shook breadsticks at one another
as if casting untried spells. An aging mentor at barside held
forth before his adminassists and executaries, forking his
hand into a cheese-ball, licking his fingers clean as he
spoke. Any abomination was excusable so long as you lived
in New York.

Gus illustrated a proper table setting with the unused
dinnerware for Jake; to his mind social graces were as
essential as social control. "Salad fork always to the left of
the regular fork," he explained.

"AO," said Jake, examining the tines of both. Something
returned to caress my leg. Slipping off his shoe so as not to
ruin my hose, Thatcher ran his foot along my calves,
appearing to his audience so expertly vacant that he might
have been running for office.

"Anyone here might try and do the do," said Susie,
rescuing her olives, drying her hand by rubbing her short
hair, hoping perhaps to bleach the gray into platinum tones.
"Pop out of the crowd and bingo. You know that." Gus
frowned; in this season he wore his memories so poorly.
"What are you trying to prove?"

"Not trying to prove nothing, darlin'. Just enjoying
myself while I can," he said, his foot writhing over my
knees. I froze, showing nothing to anyone. I dreamed of
assassinating him when he prodded my thighs with his
toes. "It's the edge that makes life worthwhile. Dancing
through the minefields of life. Like flying over the border at
night with all the lights off. Like dropping in on the
competition when they're not expecting company. Just
cause somebody lives straight doesn't mean they don't need
a rush now and then."

"You're such a fool-"

"Too damn paranoid, darlin', that's your problem," he
said, laughing. "My boys don't miss when they aim."
Clamping his lips onto her cheek as if to feed, he simultaneously thrust his foot between my legs until he could push it
no further; he wriggled his toes as if squeezing mud
between them. Choking, I dropped my glass; Jake caught it,
not spilling a drop. "What's the matter, hon?" Thatcher
asked, his eyes postcoital as he drew back his foot.

"Went down the wrong way," I said, pressing my legs
together, feeling to have given birth to something unwanted. "I'm all right."

Susie stared at me, anxious to convict, keen to execute, no
more sympathetic than any judge; my innocence was no
less real than any defendant's. "Paranoid," she repeated.
"You're the one with the lock on every lid. Always claiming
you'll spoon it out next Christmas-"

"I've helped you grasp the intangibles of the situation,"
he said.

"Imagine what I could do with whatever's in your files."
He nodded, saying nothing. "You're so good keeping
secrets when you want to. This thing you're sending her off
on tomorrow. What is it you want her to look for? What's
she going to find? You act like you think you're really onto
something."

"Maybe." A feigned guilelessness came naturally to him.
"Let's not talk business after work, darlin'-"

"No better time to talk it," she said. "What's this creep
got that you want?"

He looked toward the ceiling as he spoke, seeming to
visualize something he didn't yet own. "Somebody drops
by your house on their way someplace else," he said, "and
they go to the bathroom while they're there, and stop up the
pipes shittin' gold, you're not going to call a plumber."

She had no response to his homily. Susie had known him
from before the beginning, when he and his brother owned
nothing but a plane and a field in the Colombian highlands.
He admitted to me once that her business acumen brought
them to where they were, but only because he had, as he
put it, such blind fool timing. I can't imagine she'd ever
gotten used to him.

"If there's something you're not telling me, I wish you
would," I said, doubting that I would be heard, much less
answered. "What've you got me walking into?"

His smile resembled an old incision, a caesarean scar. "If
I knew for sure I'd tell you, but I don't. Just take a look and
let me know." He raised his glass. "A toast."

"To what?" Susie asked, lifting hers; a waiter refilled it.

"Everything," he said, a whisper to his mother.

Jake held my jacket for me when we rose to leave; I smiled
at him, and he grinned in return, his face full of blessings.
Gus led us, Jake tailed us; the crowd parted for our
movement as if for a clump of bellringing lepers. Everyone
in the place must have worked for Dryco, directly or
indirectly; reason enough for circumspection. We waited in
enveloping night for our cars to arrive. From the west a blur
breezed past Thatcher and Gus; a bicycle messenger racing
a delivery to one who couldn't wait, each knowing nothing
more valuable than a little more time.

"Watch it!" the messenger shouted, flashing by. As he shot beneath an unbroken streetlight Jake fired. The bicycle
passed some distance beyond the light's cone before falling
over. Gus put his hand on Jake's shoulder.

"You rushed, Jake," he said. "That's why I didn't act. I
could see he was unarmed."

"I'm sorry," said Jake, his knowledge seeming too much
for him as he covered his mouth with his hand.

"Remember breath, though. Breathe in as you fire and
hold it. Then let it go a few times after." Gus demonstrated.
"Like a train. Gets air back into the head."

"Just wing 'em next time, Jake," said Thatcher, dry of
emotion. I knew that within he rocked as if in an earthquake. "Low-key. That's the way."

I rode home in a Dryco car to my apartment on King
Street, which Dryco also provided; Thatcher gave me many
nails that I might use. I lived in the bottom two floors of an
1825 townhouse refitted to postmod standards by the
previous occupants. They'd lost it during the Readjustment;
maybe they never deserved it, I'd tell myself. Maybe I
passed them each morning as they raked at my clothes,
calling for pennies, crying for change. On the street and on
my stoop were syringes and shards of bottle-glass left by
passersby to remind the street's residents how long we'd
lingered at our own edges, relying on balance so we
wouldn't fall in.

My neighbor on the third floor wasn't screaming. Wrapping my comforter around me when I got into bed as if
expecting recovery a thousand years hence, I let my memory squeeze me unconscious. A friend who lived in the
neighborhood I'd be visiting told me a story that never
made the news. Sixty problem people were shot in Corlears
Hook Park by the Army. Sanitation men came in white
trucks and buried them in red bags. A woman went to the
landfill, after. With bare hands she tore away the earth until
she found her husband. Retucking the others beneath their blanket, she carried him off that he might sleep alone. One
who watched as she patted the earth down upon his new
bed asked where she'd go now. To the grocery, she said, I
got mouths to feed.

While waiting at the stoplight we watched tanks roll
down First Avenue. In the Readjustment's early months so
many control vehicles collapsed through the pavement into
the subway that those remaining assigned to Manhattan
now only traveled those streets with thicker crusts. A
semblance of calm prevailed for the moment in the city's
more disgruntled neighborhoods; many within the government, especially Army personnel-some even within
Dryco-wished to remove the soldiers from New York as
they'd been removed from other cities and send them into
Long Island where they were needed. The Drydens said no;
the Army couldn't control trouble if it wasn't around to start
it.

"It's sad that so many hope for better," said Avi, staring
into the one-way glass as if watching his favorite show.
"Hope's the truest opium. Better that people work with what they have. But no, they dream that the man on the
white donkey will ride up and put everything in its place.
As a dream, it's cancer."

"Hasn't cancer a purpose?" I asked, still dreaming that
one day I might win an argument with Avi that he admitted
to my having won.

"It makes people appreciate the world for what it is," he
said.

One tank lagged after the rest, the litter's runt. Had the
driver not recognized our car as one of Dryco's own and, for
laughs, turned its turret toward us, I don't know what Avi
would or could have done. All in Security were able in all
fields; Avi, after Gus, was ablest, but I never hoped that he
might always save us.

"I've always told you you'd be happier if you took your
life for what it is. As would they. It's only karma."

Our car inched eastward on Ninth Street. During the
night a cold front swept the clouds from the sky; morning
sun glinted off the tears of millions.

"Karma?" I repeated. "Schmeggege. You're some Hindu."
He smiled, hearing a word from a language he chose to lose.
Avi's family were Lubavitcher Hasidim; he left his old world
while still in his teens. During his twenties he feasted from
faith's buffet, swallowing and passing Unitarianism, Catholicism, Reform Judaism, Buddhism, and more, at last
assembling a plate of scraps from which he might thereafter
nibble. His unshaken tenet was a belief in an afterlife so
redemptive of the life lived before that he saw no greater
purpose to his own existence than to relieve others of theirs.

"Take it as a brand name," he said. "Like Kleenex or
Lasereo or God. A word you understand without knowing
the meaning." He cleaned his glasses with a silk handkerchief his fiancee had given him. "Even media agree," he
said, handing me his copy of Newsweek. "For the Six
Billion," the cover's blurb read, referring to those who'd left
our station on the 20th-Century train. I'd scanned the article earlier, finding simple words that presumed to
summon understanding from the years during which the
perfect Victorian world became our neopost one. Perhaps
the editors hoped that unexpected patterns might emerge
from what they threw across the pages, but the only pattern
these days was the one from which everyone's clothes were
cut. There were familiar scenes from the family album;
image upon image: Elvis beside Hitler, Joyce next to the
Beatles; the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square on V-J
Day side-by-side with the burning girl running down the
Vietnamese road; Gorbachev's face was shoved between
frame 313 of the Zapruder film and the first platoon
marching over the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge.

"It seems to me that what we live through are only birth
pangs, that the deepest pain awaits after delivery," Avi said.
"Who knows? Because ours is a sick world doesn't mean we
shouldn't love it."

At the street's far corner was an abandoned Benetton. On
its Ninth Street side was a mural limned by locals, showing
a line of ill-drawn skeletons wearing gray pinstripes resembling my own, raising metatarsals higher than their skulls in
synchronised kick. "Hell's Rockettes," he said. "Terrible
perspective."

"They've painted over the numbers along here," our
driver said, slowing that we should neither miss the place
nor run anyone down.

"It's a few doors west of Avenue A," I said. "That's it."

Excepting the entrance, the building resembled its
six-story neighbors, one of a row of cadavers awaiting a new
day's lesson. The old tenement architects had often chiseled
names above their building's outer doorways, allowing
fresh-arrived immigrants a new world dream, that their
hovels were not so much less than the Dakota or the
Belnord. The steel door of Macaffrey's school was painted
chrome yellow; the name above-Hartman-gleamed with
smudged gilt. The worn faces of stone seraphim poked from twin circles that bookended the word; each circle was
formed from three pairs of wings. The angels' eyes poured
down their cheeks, as if without suspicion they'd glimpsed
this world's Trinity.

"Don't bother them, Avi," I said, referring to those yet
unblinded, the ones on the curbs and steps and stoops.
Figures I had read claimed that Loisaida's population
density approached what it had been at the turn of the
previous century, but that didn't seem possible; too many of
the old buildings were gone, and the streets could not have
lodged so many.

"If it's necessary I act, Joanna. You know that."

The grace of Avi's that doomed and saved was that he
understood his own purpose so well. After we emerged the
driver locked the car from within; electrified its body for our
visit's duration. Dozens at once encircled and separated us,
waving empty cups in outstretched hands, their cloud
buzzing as might a beehive's.