Michael Chabon (28 page)

“Why do I have to wait here?”

He grabbed my elbow with one hand, my upper arm with the other, and lifted me into the air, about four inches off the saddle. It hurt.

“Off,” he said, dragging me brusquely onto my feet. To an observer it would have looked as though he were about to beat me up. “You’re staying here because you’re going to be very busy while I’m gone.” He reached into his trousers pocket and drew outa half-dozen quarters. “Here,” he said. “Start calling all the magic names you know. All the wise guys. Your Uncle Lenny, whoever. Ask them—with all the filial humility you’re so good at—to lay off. As a favor to you.”

“I don’t know any wise guys, Cleveland. I can’t call Uncle Lenny.”

He climbed onto the BMW, pulled on his helmet. His voice came distant and nasal through the lowered visor, as though he were talking to me from inside a bottle.

“Sure you can,” he said. “Call your dad, if you have to.” He jumped down hard on the starter, and his drunken foot slipped, pounded on the ground. “Jesus. Call collect.”

“This is not a good scheme, Cleveland. This is a bad scheme. You can’t even start your motorcycle.” I saw that I was trying to welsh on my promise to help him, so I grinned. “You’re impaired.”

He jumped again, and the bike began its controlled explosions.

“I’m huge,” he said, poking his finger into my chest. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

Kneading the damp pieces of metal in my hand, I watched him pass again through the shadows between streetlights, shrinking as he went. I wished, with sharp, strange regret, that I had kissed his cheek.

I stood with a quarter half-slid into the coin slot, my thoughts a jumble of preambles and strategies, having decided firmly but in some bewilderment that I could not call Uncle Lenny. It would have to be my father. I say bewilderment because I still did not really believe that the premature arrival of the police had anything to do with my father, and so I couldn’t quite see why I should call him except that I’d told Cleveland I would. It was intolerable enough to have to alarm my father for a good reason, but for more of Cleveland’s nonsense! I pinched the quarter, full of dread, wondering whether I shouldn’t just call to say hello. I read fifteen times an obscene graffito on the aluminum corner of the phone booth.

“Collect call to Joseph Bechstein from Art,” I said, and in a minute I heard my father saying that he would not accept the charges. In the second before my heart sank, I felt how odd it was to hear his high, clipped familiar voice and not be able to speak to him, as though the operator had raised an unhearing ghost or oracle; this woman held the switches and wire that connected us. My father would hang up, and then I would, and she would be left wherever it is that operators are.

“Dad!” I said. “Please talk to me!”

I heard the sudden silence as the woman broke the connection; then, as she blandly suggested that I dial direct, I heard the sirens growing in the distance. I dropped the receiver with a loud clunk and ran back toward the parking lot. For a few seconds I saw his motorcycle, very far away, before it disappeared from view. He must have flown past the wrong street corner, past two cops in a car with a description and an APB. One, then two, three squad cars went red and glittering after him. For the next few minutes I jogged helplessly back and forth, hopped into the air, climbed the steps of the museum, trying to catch a glimpse, aware of nothing around me but ceaseless demonstrations of the Doppler effect. I knew so little what to do that it actually occurred to me to call the police.

“Help, oh, help,” I whispered.

Then I saw Cleveland emerge from a street over behind the library, the street I had walked in my efforts to avoid Phlox, and simultaneously heard the drone and terrible flutter of hundreds of beating dove wings. The helicopter swung low and hung, it swept its single straight beam across Cleveland, and its metal voice issued an incomprehensible command. Cleveland hesitated a moment, probably from the shock of suddenly finding an uproar of wind and brilliance above his spinning head, then shot toward me, toward the Cloud Factory, as the police cars appeared behind him. The helicopter jerked upward, then dropped down again onto Cleveland. He reached the curb not twenty yards from me, let his bike fall, with its rear wheel still whirling, and ran toward the Cloud Factory, pursued by the light from above. I ran after him.

“Get back!” said the helicopter. “Keep away!” Cleveland scrambled up over the chain-link fence, tottering at the top, and then I lost sight of him. The police pulled up, left their cars, and came jingling and rattling toward me. One of them detached himself from the group and, with a shove and a hammerlock, took me into custody. I could not say that I had nothing to do with this. We watched, I and my cop. The searchlight caught Cleveland on an iron ladder, drunk and terrified and climbing very badly, a flash of white-pink under his arm. I cried out. Down, I thought, down, go down. But he continued his upward climb, running wildly along each catwalk to the next ladder, encased every step of the way in the solid tube of light, until he reached a ladder fastened to the side of the building itself, a series of bars like staples punched into the brick.

“Go down!” I said.

“He can’t hear you,” said the cop. “Shut up.”

Cleveland’s pursuers were already scaling the building around him, from all sides, when he attained the summit of the Cloud Factory. I saw him, legs apart, in the shadow of the magic valve, one waving hand extended toward the oncoming helicopter to shield his face from its light, the other clutching the naked doll. In that one long second before he lost his footing and fell head over heels over head, the spotlight hit him strangely, and he threw a brief, enormous shadow against the perfect clouds, and the hair seemed to billow out from the shadow’s head like a black banner. For one second Cleveland stood higher than the helicopter that tormented him; he loomed over the building, over me, and over the city of secret citizens and homes beneath his feet, and the five-foot shadow of the doll kicked and screamed.

I
T SEEMS
I
RESISTED
arrest when Cleveland fell, and had to be violently restrained. I have no memory of this, or of the other things that happened before the sunny instant I awoke, among bed sheets stiff as white shopping bags, my name around my wrist, suffering from what I thought at first was an atrocious hangover but turned out to be the effects of two sharp blows to the head with a rubber truncheon; I could actually see the ache, a web of phosphenes behind my eyes. As I tried to sit up, I heard a deep sigh of pleasure. I dragged my head around to find Uncle Lenny beside the bed, deep in a white chair that was too large for him. I started.

“That’s the boy,” he said, giving a little kick of his legs, which didn’t quite reach the floor. “Heehee. Good morning! So? How’s the head? It’s all better, huh?”

I looked away, too quickly, so that a black, starry wave broke over my eyes, and I said, “Ah.”

“You like the room, huh? Not bad? Private. Very costly. I got you switched soon as I heard.”

He waited a moment for me to thank him.

“Now don’t worry, Art. Your dad, he’s coming, probably’s already at the airport. Don’t worry about anything. You ain’t in any kind of trouble with the police. You got friends, Art.” He leaned forward, grunting, to touch my shoulder with two tan fingers. “You got your Uncle Lenny. And your Aunt Elaine; she’s downstairs. She came too. To comfort you.”

I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.

“What happened?” I whispered. My voice cracked, thick and new. Through the window I could see the cascading houses on the distant high banks of the Monongahela, the spread red-and-green dirty tartan of Oakland. So I was in Presbyterian Hospital.

“You got hit by a cop, a lousy Polack of a cop. We’ll take care of him too.”

“Great,” I said. “Take care of everything.” I had Friends. I had Friends who owned police chiefs, who killed, who did all the things I’d always regarded as though they were the alarming, unfortunate, faintly interesting plot elements of a television program that I did not myself watch. And now my father and my other Friends were coming to receive thanks for the fix they’d put in, for all the terrible trouble they’d saved me. I looked around my pillow for the call button, and then remembered, or seemed to remember, that Annette, Phlox’s roommate, worked at Presbyterian. I felt trapped, though I wasn’t exactly certain of how; I no longer had a clear impression of where the alliances and fissures lay among the people I knew, of who stood on which side of me and in what relation; which was tantamount, when you consider it, to my forgetting who I was. For a moment, staring at the button I couldn’t bring myself to press, I was terrified, disconnected, falling, and to protect myself I invoked, automatically, the only magic name I knew. What would Cleveland do, I thought, in this situation?

He would have pushed things, too far.

“Uncle Lenny,” I said, “why did my father have Cleveland killed?”

“Hey! Art! What are you saying? You been conked on the head, honey. Your father didn’t have nothing to do with it. Your friend, poor guy, I don’t know, he was a beginner, he got careless. He brought the heat down on himself.” He pulled intently on his ear.

“Lenny, I’m here in the hospital with a broken head. I’m in pain, Uncle Lenny; please don’t lie to me.” I knew him well enough to know that an appeal from suffering might have some effect. Aunt Elaine, who complained mercilessly of migraines, gallstones, rheumatism, cramps, had transformed her husband over the years into a kind of human palliative; all of his other appetites, for cash, domination, a famous name, had long ago found satisfaction, borne their admirable fruit, and the lone desire left him—doomed to disappointment in his Florida of the ancient—was that everyone should get better.

“Who called the police on him?” I said, and groaned.

“Oh, my. Who knows? The guy he robbed, probably.” His long lobe continued to occupy him, but I could see I had him worried. I attempted another groan, and found myself, for a few seconds, unable to stop.

“My God, Art, I should call the nurse?”

“I’m okay. Just tell me. Cleveland said my father set him up. Did he?”

“Art, look, your father’ll be here any minute; you can ask him all the questions you want, and everything. I’ll call the nurse, she’ll get you a pill.” He struggled out of his chair, then looked at me, face twisted as though he were imagining the pain in my head, his hands palm up and helpless before him. “Art, he was only looking out for you. He didn’t like it you were mixed up with the wrong people. He was mad, I guess. Yeah, he was really furious. Jesus, you should of heard him on the telephone; I had to keep the thing this far from my ear. Look, you know how he is about you ever since, I mean, ever since…”

I sat forward, all the pain flown away, and reached out to grab him by the nubby sleeve of his sweater, as Cleveland would have done.

“Ever
since what,
Lenny? They killed my mother instead of him?” For an instant this seemed to explain everything, and then, abruptly, ceased.

Lenny backed toward the door, sad and alert, suntanned and old.

“I’m going to get your Aunt Elaine,” he said, word by slow word, as though I were waving a crazy gun around. “All right? You wait here. I’m going out now.”

“What happened to my mother, Lenny?” What happened to my father? What happened to me?

He went out. The pain in my head receded before the mounting uproar in my stomach. I pressed the call button, remembering despite everything to wonder if Annette was my nurse, but it was an older woman who swept in, looking crisp and happy, cap perched upon her head like a stuffed dove.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said, and was, though there was very little inside me. I lay back on the crackling sheets.

“I won’t be able to see anyone today,” I said, accepting a glass of sweet water. “I don’t feel very well at all.”

My valiant nurse (whom I now, belatedly, thank—a kiss upon each of your lined cheeks, Eleanor Colletti, R.N.) fought off intense outbursts of paternal concern and gladioli until the first set of visiting hours was over, although each time I heard his high, soft, contrite voice in the hallway I was terribly tempted to relent, since my inclination, as I have said before, was always to accept apologies, which feed on nostalgia. Throughout the afternoon a thunderstorm came tumbling and spilling against my window, as I heard my father plead and hector and sigh; I watched the door to my room remain firmly shut and ached for that return of everything to its previous condition which is the apology’s false promise. But I knew that if he stayed long enough, it would be I who ended up apologizing, which was something—and this is exactly how I put it to myself—that Cleveland would never do. At seven o’clock Nurse Colletti, her jaw grimly set, came in to say my father had gone, and with him the bouquet. She blew upward at a stray gray lock.

It was, in fact, this continual demand of myself to think as my dead friend had thought that finally led me out of bed and to the tiny closet of my room, where I found my clothes, my battle dress. I dressed slowly, among the faint rattle and ring of hangers, feeling weak and sad in my sad uniform, found my wristwatch, my wallet, my keys, crept out of my room and into the elevator. I informally checked myself out of the hospital, which was not too difficult to do at seven-thirty, and caught a bus back to Squirrel Hill.

Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals, with the same late sun going down over the same peeling buildings and the same hot smell of water in the after shower air, can be, in the wake of a catastrophe, either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful routine. I watched, among the forty hot, plain people, a mother brush her daughter’s hair into ponytails wrapped kindly and tight with pink elastic bolos, and by the time I pulled the bell cord for the Terrace stop, I knew that everything would be all right, and that soon, very soon, I was going to be able to cry.