Lowboy (16 page)

“That’s all right, Detective.” She took out a cigarette and lit it. “I know where they are.”

It took him another long moment to answer her. “How?”

She smiled at him and shrugged. “They’ve gone to the river.”

“The river,” Lateef said.

“That’s right.”

He waited for an explanation but none was offered. “Which river, Miss Heller? The East River? The Hudson?” He squinted at her. “Not the Harlem, I hope?”

“The Hudson is closest,” she said soberly.

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier, if you don’t mind my asking? I could have arranged—”

“I couldn’t tell you earlier.” She took his arm again. “It just came to me.”

He nodded morosely and loosened the knot of his tie. He ought to have been relieved that she’d taken his failure so well. They’d already
begun walking west, toward the parking garage and the pier at the end of Houston Street. Judging by the way she moved there wasn’t any hurry.

“Can I ask you why?” he said finally.

“Why what?”

“
Why
would they be going to the river?”

The question seemed to gratify her. “Will’s grandfather used to tell him stories to help him fall asleep. His favorite was about an underground city, the exact size of Manhattan but backwards—”

“Backwards?”

She pursed her lips. “‘Backwards’ is the wrong word—upside down. Deepest where Manhattan is tallest.” She paused until she was sure that he was following. “The city had its own river, called the Musaquontas. Even Will knew that it was a fairy tale, but Richard always swore that it was true.” She took Lateef’s arm again, either to urge him onward or to keep him from falling over, and made a face that he couldn’t decipher. “The Musaquontas comes out under the West Side Highway.”

Lateef took a breath. “But what would the, ah, Missaquorum—”

“The
Musaquontas
,” she said patiently.

“Why would your son go there now?”

“Isn’t it obvious? He’s got Emily again but he doesn’t feel safe. He’ll want to take her with him underground.”

The image came to Lateef of a rat darting into its burrow and he turned away to hide his face from her. Her theory seemed farfetched at best but he supposed that it was as good as any other. Don’t forget that she’s his mother, he thought. They’re bound to think alike up to a point. He said nothing further, letting her usher him forward, marveling at her self-possession. Look at this woman, he said to himself. She’s completely convinced that we’ll find her son around the next corner. It would never occur to her that I might disagree.

He did not disagree. He stopped very briefly to let his head clear, bracing himself against her, then let her steer him up the street like
a wheelbarrow. Even given her confidence there was something incongruous about her lack of hesitation, about her measured, unhurried, entirely deliberate walk. She’s obsessed with her own son, he thought. She told me so herself. But I didn’t appreciate it at the time.

When they reached the West Side Highway the light turned green as if on cue and she crossed the uptown lanes in six smooth steps. She was moving even more purposefully now, all but carrying him forward: she seemed to have forgotten his injury. Her eyes were focused on the middle distance, ticking from side to side, noting every relevant detail. She crossed the downtown lanes almost casually and turned up her collar and stood graceful and composed on the near curb. A wind was blowing off the river and she raised a hand to keep it from her eyes. She seemed less to be scanning the crowd flowing past them than waiting to keep some prearranged appointment. She expects him to come to her, Lateef thought incredulously. The pain and the nausea were largely gone and in their place was a kind of listlessness, a heaviness in the bones, a reluctance to act that he could not account for. It was tempting to blame the accident for his helplessness—head trauma, blood loss, a possible concussion—but the feeling had begun before the accident. He’d known from the beginning that he would fail to catch the children: he hadn’t been able to make up his mind to catch them. He still couldn’t make up his mind.

“There they are,” said Violet.

He followed her gaze to what looked to be a Catholic school outing: girls of assorted shapes and ages, wrapped in identical tartans, staring mournfully across the water at New Jersey. A matron in a quilted coat, much too warm for the weather, gesticulated at them like a mime. What the hell could she be telling them, he thought. There’s nothing behind her but an air vent for the tunnel. It took him a moment to make out the children: only their heads were visible, one jet black and one blond, both of them facing due south.
Violet was sprinting already, her thin coat furling out behind her, her head set low as if to brace for a collision. The children were on the far side of the group, ignoring the matron, their heads inclining dreamily toward each other. They seemed to be lost in contemplation of some Lower Manhattan landmark: the Woolworth Building, possibly, or the construction at Ground Zero. I thought he wanted to take her underground, Lateef thought, struggling to catch up to Violet. But by then he’d realized that they weren’t the same children at all.

He called her name out as she reached them but of course it did no good. He couldn’t see her face but he could guess from the girls’ reactions how it looked. The woman in the quilted coat made a sound like a popping cork and reached for Violet’s sleeve too late to stop her. The girls themselves shrieked or swore at her or simply froze in place and watched it happen. Violet had the nearer of the pair of them by the collar and was looking back and forth from her tartan skirt to her cropped blond hair with an expression of simple animal disbelief.

“Police,” Lateef shouted, searching in vain for his badge. Violet was saying something in a dull voice that he took to be gibberish before he realized that it was German. She was bobbing her head now, her eyes flat and blank, and the girl she was holding seemed to be mimicking her. Lateef found his badge at last and held it above his head like a semaphore, reciting the word “police” with as much believability as he could muster. The only one who noticed was the matron. She spun around sharply, as though she’d been propositioned, and slapped him expertly across the face.

“Violet,” Lateef said, pushing the matron aside. “Let her go, Violet. Violet, for Christ’s sake.”

She lowered her head stiffly, her boyish blond head so much like the girl’s own, and he made out a few strands of gray. For the first time it struck him as unnatural that she looked so childlike. Her head was still lowered when she let the girl loose, bowed as if in submission, and her lower lip looked to be bleeding. The schoolgirls fell
back when she got to her feet as though the ground were coming open underneath her. Lateef took her arm in his and guided her awkwardly past them. At that moment he was afraid of her himself.

“I’d like to go home, Detective,” she said under her breath. “Would you take me home in your electric car?”

T
ell me what happened to you,” Emily said. The A and C# interrupted her and the car doors met behind her like a kiss.

“Tell me about your time in that asylum.”

Lowboy looked at her sideways. “My time at school, you mean.”

“It wasn’t a school really, Heller. Was it?” She opened her eyes wide to tease him.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I bet it wasn’t boring.” She watched him for a while with her mouth hanging open. “It wasn’t boring, was it?”

“It wasn’t anything.”

“You might as well tell me, Heller. I’ll just keep on being a bitch until you do.”

They were on the downtown 6. Before that they’d been on the Shuttle and the C and the Brooklyn-bound F. Lowboy looked out through the cracked pane behind her, watching the nothingness draw itself sorrowfully past. The gap between the train and the tunnel wall was the deadest place on earth. Nothing could happen there. School had been another place like that, at least during the flat time. A hundred well-lit rooms enclosing nothing.

“Are you still going out with Skippy Fadman?”

Her mouth clicked shut and her eyes pulled back into her head. “Who told you I was?”

He smiled at her and shrugged his shoulders.

She gave him the finger. “Skippy Fadman is a bounder and a cheat.”

“Say that again with an English accent.”

“That
was
my English accent, dumb-ass.”

He reached over and tucked the tail of her shirt back into her jeans and she let him do it. Her features were apparent to him and particular and real. The nails of her left hand were bitten down to little purple lozenges. The nails of her right hand were painted the color of blood.

“What was the name of Skippy’s band again?” He tried his best to think. “Was it Mangina?”

She laughed and turned blue at the temples. Most people blushed red but not her. “Don’t try to dis him, Heller. You can never dis Skippy. He’s seen a dozen faces and he’s rocked them all.”

He studied his new clothes in the glass. It looked as though somebody else was wearing them. “What’s the name of his band really?”

“Priapussy.”

When he said nothing to that her face turned even bluer and she looked restlessly up and down the car. “They’re a punk band, you know. They’ve all got names like that.” She let out a slow breath and shut her eyes. “It’s sort of a joke, anyway. It’s basically a joke. Even Skippy knows it sounds retarded.”

He took her square tomboyish hand in his. “It’s a beautiful name, Emily. It means something.” He nodded solemnly at his reflection. “It means that he has more than just a penis.”

Her eyes went sharp again. “It means what?”

“He can have sex with himself, that’s all. Like a sea cucumber.”

“Lucky him.”

“If I could do that I could save the world.”

Instead of asking why she started laughing. He turned back from
the window and watched the laugh run through her, shaking her ribs and her vertebrae, making her teeth buzz and click like transistors. She seemed to be laughing at a conversation that he had no part of, something at the far end of the car, or even in another car completely. It confused him. He waited patiently for her to finish, watching the laugh spill out of her, feeling the air between them shudder as she breathed. Her breath had no smell whatsoever.

“Why are you laughing?”

She stopped right away. “I’m sorry, Heller. Wasn’t I supposed to?”

“Things are going to end, Emily. Things are going to stop happening.”

She bit her lip and watched him for a while. Then she crossed her arms and nodded. “When?”

He’d meant to tell her the hour and the minute exactly but something held him back. “Soon,” he said. He made his voice kinder. “Very soon. Today.”

“Okay,” she said. She put her hands in her back pockets. “Okay, Heller. Today it is.”

For the next three stations neither of them spoke. Lowboy kept his face set and solemn but in his secret heart he was gratified beyond words that she believed him. She had always believed him, never made him feel sick, but this time it made all the difference. He slid closer to her and let the screeching of the train enclose them in a shimmering tent of noise. Inside the tent it was luminous and still. Her eyes had gone shallow, reflecting no light, and her forehead twitched as though she were asleep. She neither inclined toward him nor away. The last time we stood like this she was taller than I was, he thought.

“Look,” she said sometime later. “Look at those funny tags.” He turned his head to see what she was seeing: turquoise letters oozing by like toothpaste from a tube.

“I can’t read it,” he said. “I don’t know what those letters mean.”

“It’s somebody’s name, that’s all. Like a signature. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means something,” he said. He watched the letters coil and kink and slither. “It has to mean something.”

They watched until the last of them was gone. “Is that why you want to have sex with me, Heller?” she said under her breath. “Am I supposed to help you save the world?”

The way she said it put him on his guard. Also someone might hear. He glanced over his shoulder at the half-empty car, taking an unhurried census, squinting through the busy silver air. Seven women and six men and one undecided. A pageant of storebought faces signifying nothing. No one listening. He smiled down at Emily and drew her contentedly toward him. They couldn’t have been safer at the bottom of a well.

The train bucked and switched to a parallel track. Emily let her head rest on his shoulder. He kept his eyes wide open. In the middle of the aisle something fleshcolored glistened, a quivering wetlooking heap, and he tried to figure out what it could be. None of the other riders seemed to see it. He leaned forward to examine the thing more closely, narrowing his eyes so he could see it better. It cringed subtly under his sight.

What is it, Lowboy asked himself. What could it be. The thing wasn’t fleshcolored at all: he saw that now. It was hot pink but encrusted in a layer of filth, like the skin around the ass of a baboon. It trembled with the tremblings of the train. It could have been pudding or housepaint or latex or something that a cat would bring indoors. It could even have come from a human body. Pencaps and paperclips were lodged in its surface like daggers in the backside of a bull.

“What are you going to do, Heller?” Emily murmured. Her face was hidden in the sweater that she’d bought him. “When they find you, I mean.”

“I’ll run.”

“You won’t get far.”

“I’ve got $640.”

She pushed him away from her. “Where the hell from?”

He grinned and put a finger to his lips.

“Jesus, Heller.” She dug a fist into her forehead. “It’s going wrong already, isn’t it? It’s already turning to shit.”

“I thought it was,” he said. “Now I don’t know.”

As he said that they arrived at Union Square. Here of all places, he thought. All 469 stations in the tunnel. A sign within a sign, a harbinger, a reminder of his half-forgotten calling. They were in the head car and the whole station rolled by and Emily had her back turned to the window. Her eyes might have been sewn shut for all she saw. He kept his own eyes open and saw everything for them both. The mezzanine, the sootstreaked tiles, the platform like a fat beckoning finger. As always he asked himself why they’d built the station at a sudden turning. The city fathers were cautious men and fearful, every detail planned so carefully, but not this. The platform came to meet the train on grooved robotic feet, sliding out to cover the mistake, squaring the circle. That was why they called it Union Square.

“I’ll tell you something funny,” Emily said. “I never thought of what happened here as something that you did. I always thought it would have happened anyway.” She looked at him. “Even though you pushed me off the platform.”

“I didn’t push you off the platform,” he said kindly.

“What?”

“I didn’t push you off the platform, Emily.”

Her face turned a color he couldn’t have named. “Don’t say that, Heller,” she murmured. “Don’t say that to me.”

He tipped his head to one side, his every movement easy and efficient, and kissed her on her chapped unparted lips. Her body was unyielding but her mouth was still the mouth that he remembered. They were pulling out of the station now, pulling out as easily as they’d arrived, gliding silently past the spot where it had happened. Where she’d put her arms around him a woman now stood, picking her nose with her thumb and middle finger. He looked down at Emily to see if she’d noticed but Emily had her hands over her face.

“We’re pulling out again, Emily. Back into the tunnel. The crushload of this car is one hundred and eighty passengers but there aren’t even half as many now. There’s plenty of room. We’re under Lafayette and Ninth. We’re exactly fifteen feet under the sidewalk. The cars on this line used to be called Redbirds, Emily, do you remember? They were painted red to keep from getting tagged. They used to run on all the old IRT lines—the 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Do you know what happened to them, Emily? They went into the ocean. They got dumped off of barges into forty feet of water and turned into reefs.
Underwater
reefs, Emily. Like in Jacques Cousteau. Fish swimming where we used to sit together. Sharks in the conductor’s booth, squid in the cab. Isn’t that funny, Emily? Isn’t that a good joke?”

He held her against him and she let herself be held. His chin rested lightly on the crown of her head and he studied the things that moved outside the glass. He saw the doorjamb and the concrete wall beyond it and he saw himself between the concrete and the doors. He saw himself in that dead space holding Emily. Astor Place rolled by with its seablue tiles and terracotta beavers and Bleecker Street with its bright green bricks and Canal Street with its squat mosaic glyphs. If the C# and A rang out he didn’t hear them. With each station the train got emptier and lighter until finally its wheels hovered over the rails. The temperature in the car was seventy-two and seven-tenths degrees.

Not long after that they were alone. No one else in the car. The intercom made noise but he ignored it. He knew without listening that it was the end of the line.

“Where are we now?” said Emily, rubbing her eyes as though she’d been asleep.

“City Hall.”

She blinked nearsightedly at the empty car. “We ought to get out, then. This is the last stop.”

“We’re not going to get out, Emily. We’re going to stay.”

“What for? We’ll just—”

“Shhh,” he said. He took her arm and led her to the corner. “Sit here next to me. Keep your head down.”

“Are you trying to get us caught, Heller? The conductor—”

The C# and A cut her off. It was louder and more final than before. Another omen. “We’re going somewhere else,” he said. “You’ll like it there.”

She stared at him then but before his doubts could come she’d looked away. He felt tenderly toward her and his doubts could find no purchase in his thoughts. His thoughts were as cool and smooth as porcelain.

“I’m not ready to get caught,” she said. “Can you hear me, Heller?” She took him by the shirtsleeve. “Hello? Will?”

Hearing her say his name was a delight. The train was in motion again, clumsy and vacant, dependent on the two of them for its purpose. Without them it would not have been a train. He pictured it late at night, following its ghost through its melancholy circuit, empty as the shell of a cicada. The thought of it made him light-headed. He imagined the world that way, carbonized and disemboweled by fire, brittle and egglike, cycling through its orbit like an automated car. No more arclights, no more sidings, no more stations. No more passengers. His eyes tipped backward in their sockets and he stared into the dead starcluttered future. He was part of the future but only as a wisp of stellar gas. No life anywhere to speak of. No tunnel any longer and no hurry, no calling, no need for any kind of sacrifice. Only space and knowledge without end.

“Look at this, Heller! Look out the window!”

Slowly and reluctantly his eyes recollected the world. The left-hand windows were dark and unassuming but the windows on his right side gave out onto a glittering skylit tomb. Vaults of red and green and coppercolored tile arched gravely over desolated stairwells. Vents rose toward a city no one knew. The lights of the train did nothing to dim that prehistoric vision. Its walls shed water like the belly of a ship.

“What is it, Heller?”

“The old City Hall Station,” he heard himself answer. “The place that I wanted to take you. They shut it down in 1945.”

“Yes,” she said hoarsely. “Yes. Take me there.” Her hands left dappled palmprints on the glass.

He stood and led her from one car to the next as the train canted through its long turning. She was playful again, almost coquettish, darting ahead through each set of steel doors and pretending to be surprised each time he followed. She thinks this is a gift, he thought. A token of affection. Suddenly he understood how much there was to tell her. It was clear to him now that she knew next to nothing. He remembered the sound she’d made when he’d hinted at his calling, the harsh nervous laugh, almost cruel, and the look on her face when he’d cut her laugh short. A doubtful look. All at once he wanted to be left alone.

But he was not alone. The train was full of light and heat and noise. And behind the noise and under it were the voices.

They began as a rustling. They carried up from the floor, from behind the linoleum and woodgrain, bypassing the intercom and the doors. They made no announcements. Quiet as always at the beginning, a conversation overheard in a neighboring room, a meeting of the minds. They began as a rustling but soon he heard three of them clearly. The hum of the turbines was in them and the draw of his breathing and the clatter of the undulating train. His name was not spoken. Each time was different of course, like turning on a radio, but there was no trace of the old familiarity. Instead there was sadness and also a kind of impatience. The end of the world was not discussed, never once made mention of. And yet the voices had no other subject.

Now therefore was the time to make things happen. “Get Up and Get Courtin’” by Jelly Roll Morton. He pulled open the door at the end of the car and stepped out into the hot rush of the tunnel. The shocked air beat against his face and ears. Not long now, Lowboy thought, and the thought helped to calm him. Not much longer now until it happens. Get on up. Get on up. Get on up and get courtin’.
When he pulled the next door open he found Emily waiting there with the conductor.