Slipping Into Darkness (24 page)

 

Hoolian had opened the door a little wider, watching the bat mitzvah girl’s father, a real estate developer, short and proud, with a robust chest and a prominent brow asserting eminent domain over a retreating hairline, hugging relatives, giving toasts, and accepting white envelopes presumably stuffed with cash and checks for his daughter. The mother, a busty little battleship in a bright pink sheath, collecting bags of swag from Macy’s and Gucci.

 

And then after a few too many speeches, the two of them hitting the dance floor, risking slipped disks and muscle spasms as the deejay spun “I Want You Back.” The father draping his jacket over the back of a chair, with the cash envelopes secreted in its pockets, the swag sacks nearby, just about five yards from where Hoolian was standing.

 

The dangling sleeves seemed to sway in time with the music.
Oh, baby, give me one more chance.
Was God trying to tell him something? Saying,
Listen up, Hoolian. Don’t tell me about your hurt. Don’t tell me about your pain. This is who I look out for. Only the strong survive, so snatch them goodies, dawg. That’s why I put them there right in front of you.

 

But then she’d come over to stand beside the chair. This girl with eyes big as tambourines and coal-black hair. She looked right at him, as if she knew exactly what he was up to, taking the tiny measurements of his soul right before she hurried off to give the rabbi’s wife her Diet Coke.

 

“How are the hot dishes?” she asked over the sketch pad.

 

“Say what?”

 

“I heard Marco yell about these hot dishes before.”

 

“Oh yeah.”

 

He winced, remembering that predinner meltdown; the captain of the crew, screaming in the middle of the kitchen about needing three hundred hot plates ready for the Orthodox wedding reception next door in two hours, where the table centerpieces were each named after a settlement in Gaza.
Those dishes need to come out piping hot!!

 

“So, what did you do?”

 

“Wasn’t enough room in the dishwashers, so I had to do the rest by hand.” He flexed his left hand, noticing the bandage had gotten wet even though he’d been wearing rubber gloves. “Then I stacked them on a steel cart and wrapped the whole thing in about ten yards of Saran Wrap to keep the heat in.”

 

“Very clever.”

 

He nodded. If twelve years working in prison kitchens around psychopaths and sharp knives didn’t make a man resourceful, nothing would.

 

The brakes gave a fatigued squeal and the train listed a little.

 

“Zana.” She leaned across the aisle to shake his hand, almost spilling out of her seat.

 

“Christopher,” he said, using his middle name.

 

He took her hand gently, as if he were handling a frail bird, and then quickly set it loose, still not sure he had the timing down.

 

“What are you drawing?” He tried to see over her pad.

 

“Only your face.”

 

“Yeah, right.”

 

She had one of those tricky European accents that went flat and low when you least expected it to, so you couldn’t be entirely sure if she was putting you on or not.

 

“No one’s asking you to model previously?”

 

He turned away, deciding that she was, in fact, ridiculing him. Seconds later, though, he heard the pen sliding and swiveling, each little mark making a distinct sound.

 

“Keep your head straight.” She directed him. “It’s better when you don’t know I am watching.”

 

“You seriously drawing me?”

 

“Don’t pose.” She pouted. “Too much self-consciousness.”

 

“I wasn’t posing.”

 

“No?” Her voice dropped again, as if she was reaching under his shirt and threatening to tickle him.

 

“No, this is just the way my face looks.”

 

“I don’t believe you. This is an alligator face. This is not you.”

 

“How do you know? Maybe I’m just a crocodile knows enough to keep his mouth shut.”

 

She shrugged, her eyes playing over his features like a jungle gym. “It’s not the same thing—crocodile, alligator.”

 

“Both cold-blooded.”

 

“Crocodiles have longer noses.”

 

“Why’re you-all drawing me anyway? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

 

“You have an interesting face.”

 

He scratched the tip of his nose and turned away, thinking she could have recognized him from one of those old pictures. Ms. A. had told him to keep his head down and his collar up whenever there were photographers around so there wouldn’t be so many new shots of what he looked like now. But someone with a discerning visual sense could easily subtract a little hair and add a beard to one of the old images, like a child playing with an Identikit.

 

“You like an artist or something?”

 

“Parsons School of Design.” She put her pad aside and looked at him plainly. “When I’m not the waitress at a bat mitzvah.”

 

By all rights, she shouldn’t have been pretty at all. She was too damn wan and hollow-cheeked—almost consumptive-looking. Her neck too skinny to hold her head up, her brown eyes way too big for the rest of her face. But there was something about her you couldn’t quite ignore. A kind of casual fatalism that made her seem almost glamorous. You could imagine her lighting a cigarette and taking the time to blow out the match while you were driving a car off a cliff.

 

“I’m just surprised you use a pen. I thought most artists used pencils first so they could erase their mistakes.”

 

“Why should I erase my mistakes?” Her eyes went back to the pad. “In life, you don’t erase.”

 

“But what if you really mess up?”

 

She shrugged. “You draw around it. Or do it again, so it looks deliberate. Sometimes the picture comes out better that way.”

 

“On paper at any rate.” He palmed his chin, covering his scar.

 

“Yes,” she conceded. “Sometimes it’s better on paper.”

 

“So, what’re you into?”

 

Her mouth shrank down to a small insouciant O, as if he’d asked her to take off a piece of clothing.

 

“I mean, are you into comics or anything?” he said, catching himself.

 

“Of course,” she said, capping her pen matter-of-factly.

 

“Like what?”

 

“Mr. Art Spiegelman. Genius.”

 

He nodded, not sure who that was.

 

“Mr. R. Crumb. Genius. Mr. Joe Sacco.
Safe Area Gorazde.
Total genius.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

She ticked off the rest of the names in a bored singsong voice like a seafood restaurant hostess seating late-arriving guests. “Mr. Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez.
Love & Rockets.
Genius. Mr. Eric Drooker.
Flood!
Genius.
Eyeball Kid.
Genius . . .”

 

He was lost, not knowing any of these people. Either they’d all started publishing while he was away or had been too adult for him to read before he got arrested.

 

“What about the Marvel and DC guys?” he asked, trying to get back on more familiar turf.

 

“Oh yes. Mr. Frank Miller,
The Dark Knight.
Genius. Mr. Stan Lee and Mr. Jack Kirby. Utter complete dope fly genius. I would have the children of their children just to pass on the seed of their genius.”

 

“Seriously?”

 

“What do you think?” She let her shoulders slump in a way that left him utterly bewildered.

 

“I just haven’t met that many girls who like the same things I like.”

 

“Oh? And where have you been?”

 

He plucked at the underside of his chin. “You know. Different places. Different times.”

 

“Hmm, very mysterious.”

 

Every time he thought he’d figured out how to tell if she was kidding, the emphasis in her tone shifted a little.

 

“You draw also?” she asked, almost tipping out of her seat again as the train went around a bend in the tracks.

 

“Me?” He reached out, ready to catch her. “No, not really. I’m just mostly a fan. You know how I’m saying? Though sometimes I think I got stories. Just like crazy ideas. Nothing I’ve ever written down.”

 

“So tell me.”

 

“Nah, I’m embarrassed. You’ll think I’m an idiot.”

 

“Proceed,”
she demanded, like some impatient bureaucrat. “There are no mistakes.”

 

Easy for her to say. She looked like she was about twenty-four. What did she know about losing your freedom, about crushing boredom and despair, about making up stories when you couldn’t sleep because the men on the upper tiers wouldn’t stop screaming, about the smell of wet stone and diarrhea, about the fluttering doves of fear and anxiety going from cage to cage as word got around that another man had hung up or cut himself?

 

“Okay . . .” He cleared his throat. “So, like, mankind has cured all the major diseases. Right? There’s no more cancer, no more AIDS, no more diabetes. Nothin’. People don’t even go bald anymore. The only thing left is fear.”

 

“Hmm.”

 

“So they try to develop a vaccine to inoculate people against it. Kind of like the old polio vaccine, where they give you a little of whatever you’re most afraid of and then you don’t get it again. Only what happens is, the vaccine backfires, starts an epidemic. Everybody goes crazy with paranoia and starts trying to kill each other.”

 

She sighed. “Where I am from, we call this realism.”

 

He paused, trying to figure out what she meant. But the tambourine eyes shivered high above the hollow cheeks, giving nothing away.

 

“But then there’s one kid who never got the vaccine, because they thought he was going to die when he was young —”

 

“I thought they cured everything.”

 

“I don’t know, maybe he was born with a bad heart or something,” he said, slightly irritated by the interruption. “
Whatever.
He survives while everybody is going crazy and killing each other in the streets. During the day, he scavenges for food and at night, when all the zombies come out, he hides in the Metropolitan Museum, with all the armor and samurai swords to protect himself. . . .”

 

“And then what?”

 

“I’m not sure.” He touched the side of his face. “I never get past that part of the story.”

 

“Maybe he meets a girl,” she said.

 

“And how would he do that? Everybody else is a zombie.”

 

“Maybe she’s been hiding in another part of the museum, watching him the whole time. . . . Maybe they fall in love and try to start over the human race.”

 

He studied her, noticing that with each wash and drain of light through the windows, her face changed a little.

 

“I hadn’t really thought about it being a love story.”

 

“Who says this is a love story? Maybe they all die in the end.”

 

“Wow.” He almost laughed. “That’s kind of heavy. Don’t you think?”

 

“To me, it’s most plausible.” She shrugged again. “But I’m from Prishtinë.”

 

He knew that she was telling him something important. There was just a subtle difference of intonation, a certain way her voice went up a little when she said the name of the place. The problem was, he had absolutely no idea what she was referring to. No clue where Prishtinë might be.

 

“I guess it must be kinda rough there,” he mumbled.

 

“When I went back to my father’s house last year, all that was left were the bees in the backyard, buzzing around where we used to have the honeycombs.”

 

He nodded, pretending to understand. It had been twenty years since he’d read the newspaper regularly. For long periods, he’d just shut down and acted as if the outside world no longer existed, so he could just focus on survival. He’d been away for AIDS and crack, missed five presidential elections, been only dimly aware of the Berlin Wall coming down. Was it possible there’d been a third World War while he was gone? The accumulated weight of what he didn’t know began to hang on him like an orangutan.

 

“So, what’s your drawing like?” he asked, embarrassed, eager to get the searchlight off himself.

 

Without any great ceremony, she handed him the sketch pad across the aisle.

 

“Whoa, check it out.”

 

She’d drawn him a little younger than he was, with longer hair and untrimmed lashes, as if she’d intuited what he used to look like. She’d given him a smaller beard that would’ve left his scar exposed and an unbroken nose that made him smile a little, knowing that his actual face probably didn’t measure up.

 

But what struck him most were some of the even finer details. The crease in his brow, the folds of his neck, the triangulation of his nose and mouth. She must’ve been scoping him out for far longer than he realized, observing him intimately.

 

Maybe he should get her phone number. Maybe he should leave her alone. Maybe he should ask where she was getting off. Maybe he should move to another car before something bad happened.

 

“Hey, what are these?” he asked, noticing a series of arcs and dashes she’d drawn around his head like shards from an explosion.

 

“Edges.”

 

“Edges of what?”

 

“Of where you might begin and end, but I’m not sure. You can never tell when you first meet someone. A big man turns out to be small, a weak man turns out to be strong.”

 

“But are you going just to leave all those marks on? Or are you going to fix them later?”

 

“I leave them on, of course, so I can remember. Because this is when it’s best, when nothing is definitive. Everything shimmers. I wish it could go like this always.”

 

The train’s horn sounded a warning blast, telling middle-of-the-night workmen to get off the tracks.

 

“You’re a trip,” he said, giving the pad back. “You know that?”

 

“And you are not?”

 

“I don’t know what I am,” he said. “You want to get a bite when we get back into town?”

 

 

26

 

 

 

ON MONDAY MORNING Francis stood in the doorway of the Manhattan North Homicide Task Force, watching a northbound Broadway local roll by the windows. That deep reverberation from the el tracks sometimes made him think of dead souls going past the office, glancing in to see if anyone was working on their cases.