Lowboy (9 page)

“Emily,” he said in a reasonable voice, staring out into the traffic. Already it was the only name he knew.

Clouds hung low over midtown, pressing against the roofs and water towers and LED displays, but the sky above his head was high and blue. He looked up and saw that the cold couldn’t last. That summer had been the hottest ever, the hottest in the last one hundred years, and the summer before had been the second hottest. Nobody denied that. Nobody could. He looked over his shoulder at the stainless steel globe that divided Broadway from Central Park West, glowing so brightly in the sun that he could see it even when he closed his eyes. The globe was less than thirty years old, younger even than Violet, but already it was almost obsolete. Antarctica doesn’t look like that, he thought. Not anymore. Greenland doesn’t either. The knowledge made him feel melancholy and privileged at once, predestined for glory, a noble and underestimated prophet. He could make the clocks run backward, after all. He could keep the world from ending with the help of just one person. Such a small and ordinary thing. But that person was nowhere to be found.

His head was clear again, obedient and still, and the machinery had quieted to a purr. He remembered where he was and turned and walked into the park. The briefcase was almost weightless now. Trying to cooperate, he decided. It wants me to get it open. But even as he had that thought his face flushed with embarrassment. It’s a
briefcase
, he reminded himself. An item of luggage. It doesn’t give a shit whose hand it’s cuffed to.

A dozen steps into the park he came across a sheltered patch of lawn. He waited for a dogwalker to pass, keeping his face averted, then laid the briefcase flat against the ground. It gave the faintest shiver. He hesitated a moment longer, listening closely, but he heard nothing but the ambient panic of the city and his own hurried breathing. The briefcase was completely silent now. A screwdriver ought to do it, he thought, fingering the catches of the lock. But there was no need for a screwdriver. He pulled the briefcase toward him and the lock popped meekly open.

“What the hell,” said Lowboy, making his Philip Marlowe face. “What the hell.”

The briefcase was practically empty. It held one roll of duct tape, one small manila envelope, a stack of Xeroxed pages, and a fitness magazine. No machinery or ductwork to be seen. The hum must have been coming from some part of me, he thought. My right arm possibly. He’d just begun to consider this, opening and closing his right hand, when something about the magazine caught his eye. A talkshow host was taking his pants off on its cover and a caption next to his righthand nostril read

The shape of the magazine looked wrong somehow. Lowboy picked it up with two fingers, listening closely, then held it cautiously up to the light. A second magazine slid out of the first and fell onto the grass. On its cover a middle-aged woman in a white paper smock was lying on an operating table.

Everything had seemed strange to him since leaving the school but the magazine was the strangest thing by far. On each page a woman was visiting the doctor. The skin of their faces was pulled back too tightly, like astronauts’ faces at takeoff, and the rest of their bodies looked sunburned. They were sitting on upholstered vinyl tables or lying across them with their ankles in stirrups. They seemed to be upset. The hands of the doctor were just visible, too close to be

in focus, holding a variety of expensive-looking instruments. The women’s eyes were fixed on the instrument in the doctor’s hands, or on the stirrups, or on some other object in the room. The text under the photographs was a jumble of medical terminology and profanity that made no sense to him at all. In the middle of the magazine, where the centerfold should have been, jars of honeycolored fluid were arranged in a tight black grid like pictures in a yearbook. At the lower left corner of the page, cut off along the bottom, the words actual size were printed in fluorescent orange letters. Each jar contained a crumpled human figure.

Flipping slowly through the magazine, taking in each relevant detail, Lowboy wondered if the world deserved to end. When he reached the last page he took a deep breath and started over at the beginning. This can’t be about sex, he thought. But the captions underneath the pictures told him that it was. Finally he laid the magazine facedown on the ground and wiped his hands back and forth in the grass. I’ll save half the world, he decided. The other half can burn away to nothing.

The Xeroxes were even more confusing. Columns of tiny decimals, twelve or thirteen to a page, with minuses or pluses in between. The last number on the last page was 640.–, which seemed meaningless at first, but when he opened the manila envelope he found $640 in twenty-dollar bills. That changed everything. He felt like jumping up and down or letting out a Cherokee war whoop or kissing the next person he saw on the lips. But he contented himself with making his bankrobber’s face.

“Got you now, Indian Killer,” he said, grinning down at Andrew Jackson. The stack was almost thicker than his hand. Jackson said nothing but that was only to be expected.

Money has to do what you want, Lowboy said to himself. No matter how awful. And so do the people you pay.

Ten minutes later he was back on the A. Crowley Academy was between two stops—Christopher Street on the 1/9 and West Fourth on the A, C, E—but he’d always liked West Fourth the best. West Fourth was where the college kids got out. He never grew tired of watching them, so grown up and self-sufficient in their expensive dirty clothes. There’ll be more girls with that new haircut there, he thought. The one with the bangs. Emily might have it herself. But he knew even then that she’d look just the same, only taller and more serious, and that she’d be as patient with him as ever. That helped almost as much as finding the $640.

“Emily,” he said under his breath. He’d been afraid of her until that moment, afraid of what she might do, but now he was the opposite of afraid. She’ll be happy to see me, he thought. Happily surprised. He drummed with his fingers against his seat’s hollow back and hummed a tune to keep from getting restless. “You Don’t Learn That in School” by Nat King Cole. When he got out at West Fourth he walked past the college kids without looking at them once. He kept his eyes on the posters and the square-cut white tiles and the glossy gumspots on the cement floor. No time for sightseeing, William, he said to himself. It’s already 11:45.

What happened when he got to Crowley was like a beautiful ballet. At 11:55 he sat down on a stoop across the street from the entrance and looked into the classrooms and waited. There were three of them all told, one to the left of the entrance and two to the right, each filled with identically inclined heads. Writing in their notebooks, Lowboy thought, and the idea relaxed him. All was well at Crowley. He sat and thought about Emily and watched the girls writing. After exactly three minutes an electric bell sounded and they got to their feet like ballerinas, revolving toward the hallway door in unison, falling willingly and easily into graceful double file.

At 11:58 the doors of the building swung open and the upperclass girls came outside: juniors first, still giddy at their lunchtime independence, seniors a world-weary minute later. He kept himself quiet and waited. At 12:03 she shouldered the lefthand door open, blinking
skeptically in the midday light, swinging a black bookbag against her leg. The last of them all. Two redfaced blond sidekicks came out alongside her, talking in low courtly whispers, their awkwardness a tribute to her own. If she’d had on a dress they’d have been holding it up by the corners.

Halfway down the steps she stopped and dug out a pack of Salem Lights 100’s without bothering to look behind her. The sidekicks formed a human screen to shelter her from Crowley’s allseeing eye. She used to smoke Kools, Lowboy reminded himself. So did I. She was about to take another step when she stopped again, as though someone had called out her name or touched her, and brought her right hand up to shade her face. He himself had made no movement. The sidekicks were disoriented, unsure whether to break rank, but she said something under her breath and they laughed and went on down the steps without her. Neither of them looked across the street. Lowboy wondered what she could have told them.

She was studying him now, squinting slightly as she looked, as though a sunlit valley lay between them. He said nothing, did nothing, only waited for her to come across the street. He couldn’t have gotten up to save his life. If he could have run away he would have done it. His calling and his belief in his calling had suddenly abandoned him completely.

He’d have run away if he could have because seeing Emily was more than he could stand. Violet had said that Emily would confuse him, that she would keep him from improving, but he’d never felt less confused in all his life. A memory came to him of their last day together, the day of the accident, when they’d met on the corner of Ninth Street and Broadway and she’d decided not to go to school. Let’s run away, Heller, she’d said. Nobody will run away with me but you. Where should we go? he’d said, and she’d looked at him and said, You tell me where. Her hair had hung down into her eyes and she’d been crying. You’re my best friend, Heller, she’d whispered. He’d laughed and said, Well, you’re my only friend. I like that, she’d
told him. That means you’re all mine. She’d taken his hand and put it in her back pocket. He hadn’t felt confused then either. It’s all right, Emily, he’d said. I’ll take you somewhere. I’m going to take you with me underground.

Slowly and cautiously he held up a hand. She shook her head and stubbed her cigarette out against the railing and coughed into her palm. The look on her face wasn’t serious after all: it was wiped clean, opaque and transparent at once, like the windows of a midtown office building. The doors swung open behind her and two teachers skipped girlishly down the Crowley steps, passing her without a glance, laughing and chattering and fixing their hair. They seemed younger than her by a hundred years.

Suddenly she was in motion again, perfect in her deliberateness, crossing the wide spotless sidewalk in front of the school. It took her a long time to reach him. She stopped at the bottom of his stoop, whispered something to herself, then came up in a rush and sat above him. He looked sideways at the streetblackened cuffs of her jeans and saw that her feet were bare inside her sneakers. She never did like socks, he reminded himself. Not even in winter. He tried to catch her eye but she was staring back across the street at Crowley. I’m invisible, he said to himself, making his illusionist’s face. I’m invisible until she looks at me. He brought a hand up in slow motion and let his fingers close around her ankle.

“I caught you smoking, Emily,” he said.

Now she looked down at him. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Don’t talk to me for a second.” She slid her shoulder out from under the strap and pressed two of her knuckles to her lips. Her voice was uneven. That little lisp of hers, he thought. I’d forgotten that too. He let go of her ankle and waited for her to go on.

“Jesus Christ, Heller,” she said finally. “Holy shit.”

“I’ve thought about what you said to me,” he said, smiling up at her. “At Union Square that last day. Remember? Right before we went into the station.”

She didn’t answer.

“I know you remember, Emily.” He cleared his throat. “I want to do it now.”

She blinked at him. “You came to my school, on my lunch break, to tell me that?”

“That’s right.” He was quiet a moment. “Also I wanted to say that I was sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

The answer was so obvious that he hesitated. She looked as though she wanted to say something else but she said nothing. She pressed her knuckles against her mouth and rocked backward and forward like someone on a swing. She turned away and he disappeared again.

“For pushing you onto the tracks,” he said.

She laughed at that and sat up very straight. Did I say something funny? he wondered. He tried to remember. He tried to catch her eye but she ignored him. She was looking up again, directly ahead of her, possibly at her own desk. Something that she saw there seemed to bother her.

“You should be dead,” she said.

He didn’t know what that meant so he kept quiet. She said it a second time.

“I’m not dead, Emily.” He shook his head. “I never died. I just came here to ask—”

“Shut the fuck up, Heller. I told you to shut up. Can’t you do a single thing I tell you?”

He shut up then and let his head hang down.

“My dad told me a hundred times that this would happen. He said if it did I should speed-dial this number.” She set a cellphone on the step beside him. “It’s the police, Heller. Don’t you care about that? Are you trying to get locked away again?”

He touched his forehead to his knees and considered her question and did what he could to keep calm. “I’m not trying to get locked away,” he said.

“You’re supposed to leave me alone. You’re supposed to not see me.”

“I know.”

“There’s a court order, Heller. Fifty feet at all times. There’s no
way you could have forgotten that.” She picked the cell phone up. “Did you forget?”

“You’re the one who crossed the street, Emily.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

He nodded at her and shrugged his shoulders and began to cry. His eyes were wide open but he couldn’t see much. Two black sedans parked back-to-back across the street. An old man teetering in place at the edge of the curb, waiting for the next thing to happen. Crowley bright and bloodcolored behind him.

“What did they do to you?” Emily said.

“Where?”

“You know where. In that place you got sent.”

A schoolbus went by.

“They put me in a bed.”

“And then what?”

A second schoolbus passed. “Nothing. I just stayed there.”

“For a year and a half?”

He didn’t say anything.

“I thought they did things to you.” She looked down at him sternly. “But I guess that’s worse.”