Like Son (28 page)
“I’m so sorry,” I thought.
Aloud, apparently, because the officer turned her pinchfaced stare toward me. Clearly, she was annoyed with each and every aspect of her President’s Day assignment. Fuck her. Wasn’t this her job? And didn’t she get holiday overtime or something anyway?
“He’s dead?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, he’s dead,” she said, with a callousness and disgust that made me hate her.
I tried not to let her see me hold my breath as I continued up the stairs.
Unlocking the multiple locks of my apartment door, opening said door, and then closing and locking it again, was no simple feat for a person unaccustomed to having use of only one hand. But who was I to complain? Poor Johnny. I couldn’t believe he’d been downstairs, right under me, dead for all that time. I felt horrible for not knowing, for not helping somehow. The death smell seeped in from the stairwell outside my door. I opened all the windows to regulate the apartment’s unbearable radiator swelter and to let some fresh air in. Beaded in sweat, my forehead pressed against the middle window’s screen, I sucked in crisp night air from outside and stared at the blizzard snowfall already turning into dirty slush. I looked out at the quiet sky, and I thought how perfect it would be to smoke one of Nathalie’s cigarettes on the fire escape, just to force myself into the cold for ten minutes and watch and listen to nothing in particular.
And then I saw the blinking red light.
A new message. It was either the Newark Fire Department— Sally the nurse had said someone would call if my briefcase was found at the crash site—or it was Nathalie. My pulse stopped for the moment it took to cross the room to the answering machine. I pressed
Play
.
“
It’s me. Please pick up, handsome.
”
A beat of silence.
“
Frank?
”
Another beat.
“Okay, I’ll call back later. Love you.”
Beep.
The end.
Fuck.
I pressed
Play
again. And again. And a fourth time for good measure. I sat on the floor and realized that although I knew exactly what day and time Nathalie had called—Sunday, 10:05 p.m.—I had no idea when she planned to call back, let alone come home. As I sat on the floor, I noticed the bundle of flowers I’d dropped next to the bed two nights before. Twelve sets of paper-thin petals had transformed into a shriveled and formless sticky smear of dark purple. The flowers were dead. Or dying, perhaps.
Awkward and bruised movements, I stood and reached up around my neck to take off the sling the hospital had given me. Even the simplest movements made me flinch. After several minutes of determined effort, I’d left my tattered and bloodied clothes in a crumpled pile on the floor next to the front door, ready to be taken to the trash chute in the hall— what a fucking waste of a nice suit. I shuffled to the bathroom, sat in the tub, and turned on the faucets. Hunched over and glassy-eyed, I watched the water splash and slowly rise as I peeled off the large bandage Sally had placed over my tattoo. I sat in my sad bath of pipe-rusted yellowish water, careful not to soak my healing tattoo, failing in my efforts to keep my left arm’s cast dry, and I washed myself with Nathalie’s fancy honey oatmeal soap.
For too long I sat there, shivering in tepid water that had turned a revolting shade of gray. Eventually, after I drained the tub and splashed handfuls of water on myself in an attempt to rinse, I toweled off and slathered my tattoo with A&D ointment. There was something fundamentally disconcerting about having a chest that smelled like a clean baby’s diaper rash, but what was I supposed to do, let the tat get infected? Pajama pants tugged up with one arm, a tangled wife-beater struggled on and immediately adhered to my greased chest, I finally sat in bed. It was only 7:30, but I just wanted to pull the covers over my head and never get up again. Too tired even to sleep, I noticed that above the horizon of bare-branch trees in Tompkins Square Park, the Empire State Building was lit up white-on-white.
It’s humbling that such bullshit altruistic symbolism moved me. But it did. And for some bizarre reason I remembered a Brecht poem Nathalie had recited for me once when we first started dating. I didn’t have a brain for memorizing poetry like Nathalie, but I knew the poem went something like,
At least I’m alive … I’m like the man who took a brick to show how beautiful his house had once been
.
“I’m that man,” I said aloud—to the Empire State Building, to no one, to the empty room.
That poem is about surviving the Holocaust, Frank. Don’t be such a jerk
, I could practically hear Nathalie respond.
“I’m that man.”
Oh, sweetheart, hush it
, my imaginary Nathalie said.
The Empire State Building sparkled. If I stared long enough without blinking, it seemed to disintegrate into a shower of glittering stars. This, of course, was only an illusion.
I’m like the man who took a brick to show how beautiful his house had once been …
There I was, broken body, drained soul, doing my fucking best to tend to things properly, but, sure enough, not much more than a crumbled brick of my once beautiful life remained.
No matter how exhausted I was, there was no way I was going to fall asleep. Giving in, I got up from bed and walked over to the window. Screen pushed up, I climbed out to the fire escape. Leaning against the freezing metal railing, I looked east toward Avenue B.
I wanted dirt under my nails. And splinters in my fingertips. I needed another tree to plant.
A shrill ring suddenly resonated from inside the apartment. The phone. Zoned out, I only sort of heard three more rings. And then, mobilizing burst of reality, I stumbled back in through the window and rushed to the phone. I answered just as the machine picked up.
“Hello?”
Feedback screeched in my ear. I turned off the machine.
“Nat?”
A robot voice responded, “
One minute remains. To add credit, please hang up and call the toll-free number listed on the back of your card.”
And then Nat said: “Frank? Meet me in the park on Ash Wednesday?”
“Huh?” That reply was all my suddenly stunted motor skills allowed.
“Have you been drinking?”
“No.”
“Please meet me on March 5th?”
“That’s more than two weeks from now.”
“I can’t come home before then.”
“So much shit has happened, Nat …”
“I know, sweetheart. And I want to talk to you about it. I just need some time. I’m so sorry about all of this and—”
“No, Nat, I mean …”
My mouth stalled and my lungs burned. Damnit. Johnny’s rotting body was probably still there downstairs. My arm was broken. The train wreck. I had so much to say, but not enough composure or oxygen to say it. But it didn’t matter. Nathalie allowed only a momentary silence before she continued.
“Frank? March 5th. Please?”
“Nat, you can’t just fucking leave and then call and—”
“To add credit, please hang up and call the toll-free number listed on the back of your card.”
“Tompkins Square Park,” she said in a rush. “On the 5th. At the fountain, I’ll be—”
“Your time has expired.”
The robot operator disconnected us.
4 March 2003.
I
overdosed on pills. I hadn’t really intended for it to happen. The bottle said to take two, and so that’s what I did. At first. But those two weren’t working. So I took two more. And then, a few hours later, two more. At one point I opened the child-proof bottle with my teeth and shook out five, maybe six, of the capsules into my good hand. I slugged them back with a glass of water and forced myself horizontal. Half an hour later, I could smell the pills on my cold sweat. And still I wanted more. I was so goddamned hungry for a good night’s sleep.
In the two weeks since Nathalie’s call, I’d worked endless days at the shop, desperate to make up for lost time and money. All told, I hadn’t slept more than an hour or two each night. The clock had taken to laughing at me all night long. And so there I was, eyes dry and unfocused, staring at the walls. Remembering a stupid mind-over-matter trick I’d read in a magazine once, I tried to induce guru relaxation by forcing deep breaths and imagining that I was floating in a pool of Jell-O. Still, my heart raced and every cell of my body jittered. I could have sworn spiders crawled under my skin, and I was sure
After-School Special
angel-dust-overdose jump-out-the-window tragedies were on their way.
Following a few more hours of twitching on my bed with a parched tongue and a stomach that wouldn’t stop knotting and unknotting and doing really fucking clumsy summersaults up into my rib cage, I ended up on my knees in front of the toilet. Drenched in sweat and stripped down to my boxers and undershirt, I tried not to look into the toilet bowl as the pills, now a brown and earth-stinky liquid, shot up my throat and out my mouth and nostrils in burning swells.
Valerian root. From Nathalie’s post-apocalypse stash. There weren’t any of my old pink pills left in the apartment, and I learned super quick that the hippie alternative did not make for peaceful sleep as advertised. Even after I’d barfed up the overload, those little brown powder bombs of poison gave me heartburn. Puff the Magic Dragon, I burped up smoke clouds of nasty fungus for hours. I thought about how Nathalie had once said she thought ass tasted like dirty cabbage. Well, valerian root tasted like dirty ass.
Four in the morning, even more tired than the night before, I finally gave up and kicked myself upright. I was uncomfortably aware of a crazy vivid dream in which a giggling baby Ángel, alive and dressed in an intricate little mariachi outfit, sat in a saddle atop a howling coyote. As I’d approached him, Ángel had tapped the coyote with his spurred boots, and the two had galloped up a fluorescent-bright silver pyramid that reached high into the skies. I never did catch Ángel, but, lucky me, I must have scraped my cast against the sides of that damned pyramid over and over as I climbed it because when I woke my arm fucking ached worse than it had in the entire two weeks it’d been in a cast. Inflammation traveled from the tips of my left fingers, up my arm, past my shoulder, and, I swear, all the way to the edge of my jaw. Additional fun: The cast felt too tight and its lining snagged the hairs on my arm. I was a total whining mess.
The heating unit pinged, and a new gust of dry and overheated air invaded the apartment. Heatwaves were visibly emanating from my skin. Lingering whiffs of the vaguely still-detectable death-and-industrial-cleaner stench from the apartment downstairs filtered in. And still, for all its complications, I wished I could stay right there forever. With one catch. I wanted Nathalie shifting and settling into pictureperfect loveliness on my side of the bed. Fuck the fresh-air world outside, I would have happily watched Nathalie sleep in our bed all day if she were there.
I reached over to the nightstand and picked up the postcard I’d left next to the framed retablo the night before. Nathalie hadn’t called again, but she’d sent a card. It was a 1970s tourist postcard—all orange-tinted photograph and clunky woodcut font—of Death Valley. God knows where she’d gotten the thing, but she’d written in her pretty cursive:
3 a.m. Ash Wednesday. Temperance.
xoxo,
N.
I flipped the card over and looked at the Death Valley photo. A lumpy sparkling landscape of salt. The Devil’s Golf Course. My father had taken his wife there to fall apart. Had I ever told Nathalie that story? I wasn’t sure. No, I must have. But if I had, why would she have sent that postcard? Wasn’t it sort of fucked up? I read the back again.
3 a.m. Ash Wednesday.
Tomorrow morning.
Temperance
. The fountain in Tompkins Square Park. Tomorrow.
Ash Wednesday.
Morning.
3 a.m.
Nathalie would be back. I reread the message yet again.
Eyes sore and puffy, if I had looked in the mirror I would have seen lines etched deeply in my brow and creasing vertically at the sides of my mouth. My empty stomach churned and growled. Its acidic sloshing was identical to the sound of digested food emptying into my dad’s colostomy bag.
I put the postcard back on the nightstand and picked up the retablo of Nahui. That melancholy pout. Those silver eyes. I willed her to reach out and hold me like she’d done when my father died. Nothing. Looking at her sullen expression just made me feel worse. Things clearly weren’t working the way they should have been. Something major had to change, but what? Retablo still in hand, it occurred to me I might have a solution.
I looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand. 4:15 a.m. I calculated a tentative timeline for my plan as quickly as my sluggish brain could, and I determined that, yes, if Nathalie really would be at the park at three in the morning, just under twenty-four hours away, I did have time to do what I needed to do. Not with any to spare, but with just enough—if I got my ass in gear, quick.
So I pushed myself up off the bed, brushed my teeth, took the quickest bath known to man, and got dressed in my most trusted skater rags. Gathering what I needed from the apartment, I packed the following into a brown paper grocery bag:
1. wallet and apartment keys
2. toothpaste and toothbrush
3. blind man dark glasses and walking stick
4. two safe deposit keys
5. honey-hued worry stone
6. Nahui’s book and the framed retablo
5 a.m., I locked the apartment door behind me. On the way down the stairs, I stopped at the second-floor landing. A week before, someone had covered Johnny’s entire front door with a thick black tarp which was attached to the surrounding wall with heavy-duty duct tape. They’d also put a small bucket of coal at the base of the door. To absorb odors, I think. The coal wasn’t working.
I continued toward the F train at First and Houston.
I
thought for sure I must have acquired a special glow. Seriously, deep down I was certain people around me would know I was on the brink of radical transformation. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had come up to me, patted me on the shoulder, and said,
Go get ’em, tiger.
And why shouldn’t they have? My story was precisely the redemption song people adored most. Like ancient myths and DC Comics combined, the fates had dumped me in a vat of toxic waste and I’d clawed my way out. Best part was, the poison hadn’t turned me evil—instead, it’d given me the superhuman powers I needed to set my world right.
