Heathern (9 page)

"Nothing's happened to us yet, Joanna," he said. Returning to where I stood, fastened onto the brick, he took my
arm and pulled me away. Down on Duane Street the trucks
revved, pulling out to make their deliveries. My stomach
burned as if my ulcers were newly aflame; I sank to my
knees, my strings cut. Wanting to throw up, I threw out only
near-tears, crying without wet, without sound, that no
others might see, or hear, and so gain awareness I didn't
want them to have. "No," he said. "It's all right. It is." As he stroked my back I began to recover, drawing long, dry
breaths; my head reattached itself to my body. "A truck
backfiring. Must have been. If somebody was after us we've
given them plenty of opportunity."

"They have that anyway," I said; it did seem safe enough,
for the moment. Lester helped me to my feet; when we
walked off I noticed the street's name. I'd never heard of
Staple Street but others must have, for they lived there. A
nearby window showed kitchenlight; boxes of catfood on
the sill, a dead plant, a plastic hanukiah. We turned right,
toward Hudson Street.

"This happen to you often?" Lester asked. My mouth
ached as I answered, so harshly had I bridled myself against
my tears.

"It didn't used to," I said. "This is too much. I hate being
afraid all the time. I hate what I am. How I live-"

"Don't say that."

"I hate what I've done. What they've done to me. I hate
so much and I can't let it out." So often so-called new men
purport to admire the inherent gentleness of women, only
demonstrating they know women no better than old men;
too often a woman recirculates her rage through herself,
settling upon the likeliest victim in the most practical way.
Men play at anger, as at a game; so many times, in those
days, I too could have taken a machete and hacked through
any subway-car's passengers, but for a reason.

"You hate what you've let them do to you?" he asked.

"That too." Hudson Street looked so much more of our
time than had Staple Street that you could almost imagine
people still using it. Cars two to twenty years old lined the
curbs. Traffic restrictions ended a block below Canal Street,
and as we drew closer the streets began filling with traffic.
On the city entrance of the Holland Tunnel, at the end of
Canal, the Army ran a haphazard checkpoint, stopping and
searching vehicles for improprieties that might be seized
and resold. The line of cars awaiting entrance into the city ran, at all hours, five miles deep into Jersey; Dryco and
Army cars had their own lane, and so passed more easily.
The rumor was that the soldiers, to cut costs, reused their
testing needles on their successive suspects.

"We cross north?" Lester asked. No taxis grazed our
flanks as we raced across Canal; no tanks flattened us,
rolling down their center lane. One of several doublelength semis almost blew us over with its wind, careening
past. On the trailer was the Kraft logo; superimposed upon
that, the Dryco smile.

"You were right, what you said. I'd trust a stranger before
I'll trust a friend."

"For the right reasons?" Lester asked.

"Friends always expect you to behave in a certain way.
When you don't, sometimes, they're disappointed, sometimes they hate you. Sometimes I think people have friends
only to make sure they can always be hurt."

"So you behave differently around strangers," he said.

"I'm looser," I said. "Thatcher likes everyone highstrung. And the people I've known the longest and have
been the closest to are also the biggest liars I know, so-"

"How much do you think has rubbed off on you?"

On the far corner an enormous office building had been
torn down years before for luxury apartments never built.
Hundreds of smaller residences were scattered across the
lot in its stead: boxes and crates, ill-pitched tents, tin-walled
huts, clusters of cardboard. At the neighborhood's center
stood a small frame shack, surely the home of that community's Thatcher.

"Enough, I'm afraid," I said. "I used to have so many
more friends."

"What happened to them?"

"Bankrupt between breakfast and lunch," I said. "Lost
their jobs. Their apartments. If I saw them I wouldn't know
them now."

"You would," said Lester.

"It was just luck it didn't happen to me," I said. "Bernard
moved to Dryco just before. I moved as well. The right
place, the right time. I couldn't help it."

"It's all right-"

"It'd never happen again," I said. "Everything hinges on
his behavior. My life depends on how crazy he gets. I don't
like it."

Along these blocks the remnant of a more traditional
neighborhood remained: a diner, a deli, a row of shops
partially rented. In the deli window was a sign written in
Korean and English, reading Japs Keep Out, looking so old as
to refer to Axis-allied Japan. The doors of stores were open
to catch cool evening breezes. Two young girls thrashed
about on the sidewalk, arguing and cursing, pinning one
another with pipestem legs; they looked Jake's age, or
younger. A gang of boys hooted; several older men
watched, keeping their hands in their pockets. The girls
screamed, oblivious to sideshow eyes.

"You said that older man killed three Presidents," Lester
said. Three teenagers, their shaved heads making them
resemble mad insects, shoved by us as they made for the
brawl. "Who was the third?"

"Gus was on the grassy knoll," I said. The crowd's
scream faded to a whisper, the farther we drew from it.
Lester took so long to respond that I wondered if he'd heard
me.

"You're serious?"

"That's what Thatcher told me. As I understand it Gus
didn't know Oswald was there until they started shooting. I
suppose they were as shocked as anyone."

"Who fired the shot that killed him?"

"Gus isn't sure," I said.

One last small shop sold mineral specimens, petals of
stone, roses plucked from the rock. I doubted the doctors
had a lease. After that the street passed through dead
blocks, every building's windows and storefronts boarded up as against the flood. Flowered decals brightened some
windows' blinders. Sprigs of colorless grass sprouted
through the broken sidewalk. So abandoned in haste did all
appear that I imagined entering any of the buildings,
finding coffee still warm in cups, toothpaste still wet upon
brushes, and not even a scrap to show where everyone
went.

"That your company's mark?" Lester asked, pointing
toward an upper floor. Plastered below the cornices were
block-long posters advertising the new development shortly rising on that lot. They'd missed the target completion
date by three years. It seemed too late to idly seek logos, but
at last I saw what he saw, a small design in no way
resembling Dryco's empyrean leer.

"Bank of Nippon," I said. "Their mark. These are some
more frozen assets. I'm sure he'll wind up with them
eventually. I've lost track of half of what they have."

"Do they own everything?" Lester asked, seeming overly
aware of what everything contained.

"Every business has a little bit of Dryco in it."

"How'd they do it?" he asked. "Luck? Did they plan it?"

"Their government reps found out about the revaluation
before it went into effect," I said, explaining it as I'd heard it
from Bernard. "Some of them suggested it. Before it went
through the Drydens'd already traded the old money in for
new bills. They wanted to see their competition in the drug
field out of business as badly as the government did, of
course. When the market crashed Susie was the only one
able to buy. She bought fifty percent of seventy companies.
That was all they needed."

"What was he doing at the time?"

"Conferring in Washington," I said. "By sunset the deals
were done. I don't think either of them knew before it
happened how far they'd be able to take it."

It was such an odd feeling to speak to another without
interruption, certain too that I was being heard. "She seems the more pragmatic of the two," he said. "She knows about
you and-"

I nodded. "Everybody knows, I think. Sometimes I talk
to Avi about it. Bernard never wants to hear." Somewhere
to the north something blew up. I wondered if we'd find my
house where I'd left it. "Thatcher was sort of a rebound,
after Avi."

On the side of a building was another aging billboard,
this one older than many. God Sees Those Who Come Unto
Him was the message printed below the photo. Swastikas
were scrawled across the picture's faces, the survivors on
their day of liberation. Avi's father had been in Maidanek
during most of the war. With his family he left Crown
Heights when the Army entered Brooklyn. Avi sent half of
his salary every month to their upstate shtetl. Does he know
how you earn your money? I asked him, on our last night.

He knows a purpose beyond understanding, Avi replied.

A guard's supposed to defend. Thatcher says kill and you
go after anyone he wants.

It's my job.

Nazi, I called him.

There's no comparison. The Drydens are like a mother
animal rolling over and suffocating her young as she sleeps.

They're not so unconscious.

Nor are you, he said, kissing my hands. I allowed myself
to reenter my unavoidable world. "Joanna?" Lester asked.
"You there?"

"I'd never thought about Thatcher before," I said. "Not
in that way. Not until later. So much could have been
avoided. I might still be myself."

"Maybe," said Lester. "They provide maps without
roads. We have to hack our own path."

"They," I repeated. "Are there really two of Them?"

"Way I describe it isn't strictly accurate," he said. "Problem of popularizing. Everybody understands, at least, way I
tell it. The split between Their aspects is a decided one, I'm never sure which One I'm hearing until I listen a spell. And
I can always talk to Them, see, but They don't always talk to
me.

"But you can talk to Them-"

"Not incessantly," he said, "and They don't tell me
everything."

"If They're separate," I asked, "what tore Them apart?"

Signs noting curfew were so peppered by gunblasts that
they could have been used as graters. As two halftracks
rumbled downtown no fresh shots rang out, no footsteps
echoed but our own, and none in command chose to stop us
for interrogation. I dreamed of safety, so close to home.
"Creation," he said.

"How?"

"A difficult birth," he said. "Whether They're truly split,
I'd hate to say. I'm not sure that They even know. It's a
spiritual division more than a physical, I believe."

"If They are split," I said, "could They ever reunite?"

He nodded. "There's a problem in that."

"What else is new?-"

"If They do, the world will be made anew. But that means
the world as we know it must end."

"It must?" I asked. "You know that?"

"They pull up the corner of a blanket sometimes and
show me what's underneath. When They feel like it They
show me something else. It's up to me to draw the
inferences. The blind men and the elephant, nothing
more."

King Street was a block away; something hung from my
corner's lamppost but it didn't look as if it had ever been
alive. Tank-treads rutted the new-tarred pavement, looking
as fossils on the land. "Thanks for walking with me," I said.
"I live around the corner. Would you like to come in?"

"Sure."

"I'm sorry I ask so many questions," I said.

"You know the story of Job?" Hearing no response, he continued. "Job questioned God. God questioned Job in
return. They made an arrangement and Job returned to his
life. Years later a stranger called on Job, demanding to know
the answer to a question. 'He tells you to speak to Him as an
equal and you let Him treat you like that?' the stranger
asked, and Job answered, 'Listening to Him as He spoke I
realized that the Creator may need neither sense nor sanity
to do as He does, and that our failings in such may be more
godlike than we know. It seemed most reasonable to agree
with everything He said."'

I brushed the day's debris from my steps with my foot
into a neat pile at the bottom. My neighbor screamed,
welcoming us home; Lester seemed afraid until he saw I
could no longer respond to her voice. Bernard once told me
how the screams of children in his building kept him awake
at night. "That wasn't all that happened," Lester continued.
"'You have no more questions?' God asked Job, he told the
stranger, and Job had one more question, but worried that
he'd tested God too much, and so for an endless time only
mouthed the word with his lips. 'You don't learn if you
don't ask,' God said.

"'Why?' Job finally asked, but God was gone."

Switching off the alarms I flipped on the overheads,
bringing light throughout my house. "This is all your
place?" Lester asked, hovering behind me as if fearful to
step further into the entry. Once he came in I reset the
alarm, locked the five locks, slid the police bar back up. If
anyone lay in wait I had a gun in my purse, but I had never
had to use it.