Moon Palace (8 page)

That was how Kitty explained it to me. It sounded plausible enough at first, but once I started to think about it, her story grew less convincing. “I still don’t understand why you came,” I said. “We had only met each other that one time, and I couldn’t have meant anything to you then. Why would you go to all that trouble for someone you didn’t even know?”

Kitty turned her eyes away from me and looked down at the floor. “Because you were my brother,” she said, very quietly.

“That was just a joke. People don’t put themselves out like that for the sake of a joke.”

“No, I guess not,” she said, giving a small shrug. I thought she was going to continue, but several seconds went by, and she did not say anything more.

“Well?” I said. “Why did you do it?”

She looked up at me for a brief moment, then fixed her eyes on the floor again. “Because I thought you were in danger,” she said. “I thought you were in danger, and I had never felt so sorry for anyone in my life.”

She went back to my apartment the following day, but I was
already gone by then. The door was ajar, however, and as she pushed it open and stepped across the threshold, she found Fernandez whirling around the room, angrily stuffing my things into plastic garbage bags and cursing under his breath. As Kitty described it, he looked like someone trying to clean out the room of a man who had just died of the plague: moving swiftly in a panic of revulsion, barely even touching my belongings for fear they might infect him. She asked Fernandez if he knew where I had gone, but there wasn’t much he could tell her. I was a crazy, fucked-up son of a bitch, he said, and if he knew anything about anything, I was probably crawling off somewhere to look for a hole to die in. Kitty left at that point, went back down to the street, and called Zimmer from the first telephone booth she found. His new apartment was on Bank Street in the West Village, but when he heard what she had to tell him, he dropped what he was doing and rushed uptown to meet her. That was how I finally came to be rescued: because the two of them went out and looked for me. I was not aware of it at the time, of course, but knowing what I know now, it is impossible for me to look back on those days without feeling a surge of nostalgia for my friends. In some sense, it alters the reality of what I experienced. I had jumped off the edge of a cliff, and then, just as I was about to hit bottom, an extraordinary event took place: I learned that there were people who loved me. To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the one thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

I
had no clear idea of what I was going to do. When I left my apartment on the first morning, I simply started walking, going wherever my steps decided to take me. If I had any thought at
all, it was to let chance determine what happened, to follow the path of impulse and arbitrary events. My first steps went south, and so I continued to go south, realizing after one or two blocks that it would probably be best to leave my neighborhood anyway. Note how pride weakened my resolve to stand aloof from my misery, pride and a sense of shame. A part of me was appalled by what I had allowed to happen to myself, and I did not want to run the risk of seeing anyone I knew. Walking north meant Morningside Heights, and the streets up there would be filled with familiar faces. If not friends, I was sure to bump into people who knew me by sight: the old crowd from the West End bar, classmates, former professors. I did not have the courage to withstand the looks they would give me, the stares, the mystified second glances. Worse than that, I was horrified by the thought of having to talk to any of them.

I headed south, and for the rest of my sojourn in the streets, I did not set foot on Upper Broadway again. I had something like sixteen or twenty dollars in my pocket, along with a knife and a ballpoint pen; my knapsack contained a sweater, a leather jacket, a toothbrush, a razor with three fresh blades, an extra pair of socks, skivvies, and a small green notebook with a pencil stuck in the spiral binding. Just north of Columbus Circle, less than an hour after I had launched out on my pilgrimage, an improbable occurrence took place. I was standing in front of a watch-repair shop, studying the mechanism of some ancient timepiece in the window, when I suddenly looked down and saw a ten-dollar bill lying at my feet. I was too shaken to know how to react. My mind was already in a tumult, and rather than simply call it a stroke of good luck, I persuaded myself that something profoundly important had just happened: a religious event, an out-and-out miracle. As I bent down to pick up the money and saw that it was real, I began to tremble with joy. Everything was going to work out, I told myself, everything was going to come out copy in the end. Without pausing to consider the matter any further, I walked into a Greek coffee shop and treated myself to a farmer’s breakfast: grapefruit
juice, cornflakes, ham and eggs, coffee, the works. I even bought a pack of cigarettes after the meal was over and remained at the counter to drink another cup of coffee. I was seized by an uncontrollable sense of happiness and well-being, a newfound love for the world. Everything in the restaurant seemed wonderful to me: the steaming coffee urns, the swivel stools and four-slotted toasters, the silver milkshake machines, the fresh muffins stacked in their glass containers. I felt like someone about to be reborn, like someone on the brink of discovering a new continent. I watched the counterman go about his business as I smoked another Camel, then turned my attention to the frowsy waitress with the fake red hair. There was something inexpressibly poignant about both of them. I wanted to tell them how much they meant to me, but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. For the next few minutes, I just sat there in my own euphoria, listening to myself think. My mind was a blithering gush, a pandemonium of rhapsodic thoughts. Then my cigarette burned down to a stub, and I gathered up my forces and moved on.

By midafternoon, the weather had become stifling. Not knowing what else to do with myself, I went into one of the triple-feature movie theaters on Forty-second Street near Times Square. It was the promise of air conditioning that lured me in, and I entered the place blindly, not even bothering to check the marquee to see what was playing. For ninety-nine cents, I was willing to sit through anything. I took a seat in the smoking section upstairs, then slowly worked my way through ten or twelve more Camels as I watched the first two films, the titles of which I now forget. The theater was one of those gaudy dream palaces built during the Depression: chandeliers hanging in the lobby, marble staircases, rococo embellishments on the walls. It was not a theater so much as a shrine, a temple built to the glory of illusion. Owing to the temperatures outside, the better part of New York’s derelict population seemed to be in attendance that day. There were drunks and addicts in there, men with scabs on their faces, men who muttered to themselves and talked back to the actors on the screen,
men who snored and farted, men who sat there pissing in their pants. A crew of ushers patrolled the aisles with flashlights, checking to see if anyone had fallen asleep. Noise was tolerated, but it was apparently against the law to lose consciousness in that theater. Each time an usher found a sleeping man, he would shine his flashlight directly in his face and tell him to open his eyes. If the man didn’t respond, the usher would walk over to his seat and shake him until he did. The recalcitrant ones were ejected from the theater, often to loud and bitter protests. This happened half a dozen times throughout the afternoon. It didn’t occur to me until much later that the ushers were probably looking for dead bodies.

I didn’t let any of it bother me. I was cool, I was calm, I was content. Given the uncertainties that were waiting for me once I walked out of there, I had a remarkably firm grip on things. Then the third feature began, and all of a sudden I felt the ground shift inside me. It turned out to be
Around the World in 80 Days
, the same movie I had seen with Uncle Victor back in Chicago eleven years before. I thought it would give me pleasure to see it again, and for a short time I considered myself lucky to be sitting in the theater on the precise day when this film was being shown—this film, of all the films in the world. It seemed as though fate was watching out for me, as though my life was under the protection of benevolent spirits. Not long after that, however, I discovered strange and unaccountable tears forming behind my eyes. At the moment when Phileas Fogg and Passepartout scrambled into the hot air balloon (somewhere in the first half-hour of the film), the ducts finally gave way, and I felt a flood of hot, salty tears burning down my cheeks. A thousand childhood sorrows came storming back to me, and I was powerless to ward them off. If Uncle Victor could have seen me, I thought, he would have been crushed, he would have been sick at heart. I had turned myself into a nothing, a dead man tumbling head-first into hell. David Niven and Cantinflas were gazing out from the carriage of their balloon, floating over the lush French countryside, and I was down in the darkness with a bunch of drunks, sobbing out my wretched
life until I couldn’t breathe anymore. I stood up from my seat and made my way for the exit downstairs. Outside, the early evening assaulted me with light, surrounded me with sudden warmth. This is what I deserve, I said to myself. I’ve made my nothing, and now I’ve got to live in it.

It went on like that for the next several days. My moods charged recklessly from one extreme to another, shunting me between joy and despair so often that my mind became battered from the journey. Almost anything could set off the switch: a sudden confrontation with the past, a chance smile from a stranger, the way the light fell on the sidewalk at any given hour. I struggled to achieve some equilibrium within myself, but it was no use: everything was instability, turmoil, outrageous whim. At one moment I was engaged in a philosophical quest, supremely confident that I was about to join the ranks of the illuminati; at the next moment I was in tears, collapsing under the weight of my own anguish. My self-absorption was so intense that I could no longer see things for what they were: objects became thoughts, and every thought was part of the drama being played out inside me.

It had been one thing to sit in my room and wait for the sky to fall on top of me, but it was quite another to be thrust out into the open. Within ten minutes of leaving the theater, I finally understood what I was up against. Night was approaching, and before too many more hours had passed, I would have to find a place to sleep. Remarkable as it seems to me now, I had not given any serious thought to this problem. I had assumed that it would somehow take care of itself, that trusting in blind dumb luck would be sufficient. Once I began to survey the prospects around me, however, I saw how dismal they really were. I was not going to stretch out on the sidewalk like some bum, I said to myself, lying there for the whole night wrapped in newspapers. I would be exposed to every madman in the city if I did that; it would be like inviting someone to slit my throat. And even if I wasn’t attacked, I was sure to be arrested for vagrancy. On the other hand, what possibilities for shelter did I have? The thought of spending the
night in a flophouse repulsed me. I couldn’t see myself lying in a room with a hundred down-and-outs, having to breathe their smells, having to listen to the grunts of old men buggering each other. I wanted no part of such a place, not even if I could get in for free. There were the subways, of course, but I knew in advance that I would never be able to close my eyes down there—not with the lurching and the noise and the fluorescent lights, not when I thought some transit cop might be coming along at any moment to crash his nightstick against the soles of my feet. I wandered around in a funk for several hours, trying to come to a decision. If I eventually chose Central Park, it was only because I was too exhausted to think of anything else. At about eleven o’clock I found myself walking down Fifth Avenue, absently running my hand along the stone wall that divides the park from the street. I looked over the wall, saw the immense, uninhabited park, and realized that nothing better was going to present itself to me at that hour. At the very worst, the ground would be soft in there, and I welcomed the thought of lying down on the grass, of being able to make my bed in a place where no one could see me. I entered the park somewhere near the Metropolitan Museum, trekked out toward the interior for several minutes, and then crawled under a bush. I wasn’t up to looking any more carefully than that. I had heard all the horror stories about Central Park, but at that moment my exhaustion was greater than my fear. If the bush didn’t keep me hidden from view, I thought, there was always my knife to defend myself with. I bunched up my leather jacket into a pillow, then squirmed around for a while as I tried to get comfortable. As soon as I stopped moving, I heard a cricket chirp in an adjacent shrub. Moments later, a small breeze began to rustle the twigs and slender branches around my head. I didn’t know what to think anymore. There was no moon in the sky that night, not a single star. Before I remembered to take the knife out of my pocket, I was fast asleep.

I woke up feeling as though I had slept in a boxcar. It was just past dawn, and my entire body ached, my muscles had turned into knots. I extricated myself gingerly from the bush, cursing and
groaning as I moved, and then took stock of my surroundings. I had spent the night at the edge of a softball field, sprawled out in the shrubbery behind home plate. The field was situated in a shallow dip of land, and at that early hour a speckle of thin gray fog was hanging over the grass. Absolutely no one was in sight. A few sparrows swooped and chittered in the area around second base, a blue jay rasped in the trees overhead. This was New York, but it had nothing to do with the New York I had always known. It was devoid of associations, a place that could have been anywhere. As I turned this thought over in my mind, it suddenly occurred to me that I had made it through the first night. I would not say that I rejoiced in the accomplishment—my body hurt too much for that—but I knew that an important piece of business had been put behind me. I had made it through the first night, and if I had done it once, there was no reason to think I couldn’t do it again.