The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (17 page)

“I can’t believe you’re just going to run off like this. What happened to being madly in love with me?”

Arnold tied his shoes, one at a time. “I never said madly.”

“Fine, get the hell out of here,” she snapped. “You think you know everything.”

“Not everything. Just enough.”

“Well, just so everything’s clear, you can’t possibly remember me interviewing you at N.Y.U. because I didn’t. I didn’t even go to N.Y.U. I just happened to be at the campus store one day when you were signing books.”

“It’s all water under the bridge,” said Arnold. “You got your interview. That’s what you wanted. If the Trotskyites take over, I’m sure you’ll be minister of propaganda or something like that.”

He looked around the room to see if he’d left behind any belongings. The tomato sprouts were all that were truly his—and he couldn’t possibly take those with him. He considered asking the girl to look after them, but that was like asking a child molester to babysit. Better to let the shoots fend for themselves. He walked over to the
window sill and tucked his Nixon mask into his pocket. He also scooped up the girl’s cigarettes and her lighter—that seemed like the least he was entitled to as compensation. When he turned around, the girl was blocking his exit.

“You’re not being fair,” she said.

“Okay,” agreed Arnold. “I’m not being fair.”

He attempted to step around her. She impeded his retreat.

“You’re forcing my hand,” she said. “If you leave, you’ll regret it.”

Arnold stepped toward her. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” said the girl. “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

She was going to turn him in
.

“I’m not stupid,” said the girl. “I either get you or $500,000.”

That’s when Arnold snapped. All the tension of the past two weeks roared up inside him and he grabbed the girl by the neck. His hands wrapped around her throat, squeezing, while her fingers tried to pry them free. She kicked at him too, but the blows glanced off the sides of his leg. Her head twisted and bobbed. At some point her hair fell backwards, revealing an expression too surprised to be terrified. He was killing her, second by second. And then the dog barked. Just once. But enough to break his trance. He released his grip and she was breathing again, choking,
sputtering blood.

She inched backwards, the fear rising in her face. He didn’t know what to say.

“You’ve got to look after my tomatoes,” he said.

Then he fled through the door and out into the twilight.

Arnold waited in the darkened entryway of a
scrap-metal
dealership until the pedestrian traffic thinned on the avenue. Then he burrowed his head into his shirt and walked briskly down to the Brooklyn Bridge and across the East River into Manhattan. But he returned to his native borough as a homing pigeon might, utterly unequipped with further plans for survival. To make matters worse, a profound and acute loneliness overtook him. He hadn’t realized how good he’d had it in Cassandra’s company, but now that his social circle had contracted from one to zero, he longed for human companionship. Alas, there were only two people in the entire world he could trust—and one was holed up behind a police cordon, surrounded by Spitford’s minions, while the other was probably being skinned alive by the Peruvian version of the Stasi. Arnold couldn’t even befriend his fellow homeless. Even if he might surmount the class and education barriers, not to mention the initial distrust that kept apart strangers in the city, their bonds would melt quickly at the prospect of reward money. No, he was on his own. And so began the two long weeks of social isolation during which Arnold eked out his sustenance in Central Park. During the day, he concealed himself in dense brush and watched the parade of joggers who crowded the meandering paths, the joyful picnickers and
shameless lovers who congregated in what they thought were secluded groves. It was like being surrounded by a carnival and yet locked in solitary confinement at the same time. He couldn’t even maintain a permanent campsite—if you could call a clump of dried leaves a campsite—because the police conducted random patrols. Their goal seemed to be to prevent vagrants from building cardboard cities, as they’d done in the 1980s. As a result, they chased the homeless from location to location. Their efforts reminded him of his own futile efforts to smoke out a woodchuck from under his pumpkin patch.

One night, Arnold slept in a mound of mulch near the zoo. On another occasion, he came across a ragged mattress lying beside the service drive that looped around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It smelled faintly of vomit—but that was a small price to pay for the soft feel of polyurethane under one’s head. For food, the botanist initially relied on grasses and wildflowers, occasionally supplemented by a crust of cold pizza or an apple core he unearthed in a trash can. He knew no shame. He could afford no shame. His clothing quickly wore away at the knees and elbows, tattered gaps that soon forced the amputation of the sleeves and cuffs below. Showering also proved impossible, as the park service had installed mesh security gates around all of its ponds. He slept further away from the trails, afraid his stench might give him away. Even Arnold’s small successes rapidly degenerated into failure.
When he was fortunate enough to acquire a torn sleeping bag, apparently abandoned by a fellow park-dweller, he’d hardly dozed off before a pair of pre-teen thugs stumbled across his hideaway. He awoke to the patter of urine on his exposed feet and the back of his head. In hindsight, he was thankful that the boys hadn’t set him on fire. Later that week, Arnold broke into a Goodwill dumpster and pilfered a new set of clothes. Unfortunately, the dungarees he selected were infested with fleas that raised burning welts on his ankles and around his groin. He scoured the curb side trash along 110
^th
Street for protective pet collars to wrap around his ankles and penis. Again, Arnold tried to look on the bright side: At least the pants hadn’t been infected with flesh eating bacteria. Or laced with biological toxins. But there were mornings when he wouldn’t have minded a chaser of smallpox or anthrax to wash down his dandelion sandwiches.

Keeping abreast of the news also proved more difficult without access to Cassandra’s radio and internet connection. Arnold found his best source of information were the old newspapers that the park police used to insulate the stable attached to their uptown headquarters. He didn’t dare steal the newspapers from underneath the horses, of course, but every few days a groundskeeper stacked the old pages at the curb side for recycling. They smelled pungently equine. Often they came with a fresh supply of straw and horse droppings. But they did supply the news. And all
of it, during those long weeks of summer, was bad. First, the old transvestites “broke under pressure” and confessed that they sold fake IDs in addition to costumes: passports, drivers licenses, liquor purchasing cards. But to college kids, they insisted. Not suicide bombers. The authorities didn’t buy the distinction. In fact, they suggested that would-be terrorists like Arnold might even be using unsuspecting college students as middlemen. “Don’t be surprised if a ‘corrupting the welfare of a minor’ charge is added to the indictment,” one unidentified source told the
Daily News
. “We haven’t found a minor yet. But we’re looking.” Prominent gay leaders were quick to condemn Gladys and Anabelle as “not representative of our community.” A right-wing talk-show host branded them “The Women of a Thousand Faces” and the moniker stuck. Two days later, the police arrested Lucinda, Arnold’s bookkeeper, on suspicion of harbouring a fugitive. It turned out that her brother, a security guard at a local department store, shared the name of a wanted Al Qaida operative. The newspapers ran the story of the pair’s capture on page one. When the police finally figured out that the sixty-one year old diabetic guard wasn’t the bomb-maker in their dossier, the same papers ran small corrections in their Metro section. None of this did much for Arnold’s reputation. Eventually, Arnold stopped reading the news scraps entirely. Better to be uninformed than regularly demoralized. Besides, if anything truly important happened—if the messiah
showed up, for example, or if the world ended—he was bound to find out eventually.

The only genuine pleasure of living in the park—as compared to life in Cassandra’s apartment—was that Arnold was able to add wild mushrooms to his diet. He hadn’t trusted the girl to distinguish the mouth-watering Coccora,
Amanita calytroderma,
from the one-hundred percent lethal Death Cap,
Amanita phalloides
. (Arnold could tell the species apart quite easily, but only from contextual clues of microhabitat; once they were harvested, the two species proved virtually identical.) To Arnold, his new outdoor home offered a seemingly inexhaustible variety of flavours. He lurked around the Great Lawn in the hours before dawn, gorging himself on morels and toadstools. He discovered a stand of black locusts near the southeast gate that proved a veritable smorgasbord for shelf fungi. A row of young cherry trees bordering the Sheep Meadow offered up a bounty of white polypores. For breakfast, Arnold supplemented his dandelion sandwiches with a raw paste concocted from clinker fungus, black knots and puffballs. He hadn’t thought much about mushrooms in recent years, consumed as he was with petal-based meals, but he found that the know-how returned to him as quickly as a foreign language or the ability to ride a bicycle. Fungi soon displaced plant-life as the backbone of his diet and gathering these morsels consumed the greater portion of his time. The energy he expended distinguishing
mycotic delicacies from closely-related toxins was effort not squandered in thinking about his former life. It was only when Arnold took a break from his foraging, maybe to examine the summer night sky, that he found himself thinking of Judith, and Gilbert Card, and what that crazy girl had done to his beloved garden. So he tried to think as little as possible. Scouring the high grass on his knees was a far better way to retain what remained of his sanity.

Arnold was hunkered over a grove of white-capped boletes one sultry evening, trying to recollect whether this particular species was poisonous, when he felt a cool, sharp sensation on the back of his neck. At first, he took it for a bead of water—but as he reached around to brush away the droplet, its pressure increased abruptly. He was feeling a weapon, he realized. His suspicions were confirmed when a deep male voice ordered him to place his hands over his head. “Slowly, man,” said his assailant. “Okay, now stand up and turn around.” The botanist did as he was instructed. He expected to confront a police officer wielding a handgun—or possibly an entire SWAT team ready to brutalize him at the slightest provocation. Instead, he found himself face to face with a naked man wielding a saber.

“Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Arnold. “You’re the
Bare-Ass
Bandit.”

“So I’ve been told,” said the lunatic. He wore only sneakers and a long scabbard attached to a braided leather belt. “But I’m glad you recognized me. That means you
know what to do next.”

“This is unbelievable,” answered Arnold. “My goddam life falls apart and on top of that I get attacked by a headcase.”

He knew he ought to have felt frightened, but he didn’t. He was too worn out to be frightened. Or maybe Cassandra’s pseudo-student Calvinism had rubbed off on him. In any case, he was overcome with a powerful calm. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. Being frightened wouldn’t change a thing.

“It’s time for you to remove your clothing,” said the Bandit, matter-of-factly. He waved the sword only inches from Arnold’s throat. “Then we’ll see what other adventures might be in store for you.”

Arnold kept his hands over his head. He smiled indifferently.

“I said, take off your clothes,” ordered the Bandit. “Trust me, man. You don’t want to end up human
shish-kabob
.”

Arnold didn’t move. He sensed he was grinning like an idiot.

“Dammit, I’m warning you,” said the Bandit. “Are you going to do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Arnold turned his palms upward in a quasi-shrug. “I’m not going to do it at all,” he said. “If it’s that important to you, stab me. See if I give a damn.”

“Are you crazy, man? Your life is on the line here.”

“I’ve already lost my wife, my business and my garden….So if this is how it’s meant to end, I’m not going to fight it.”

“Don’t be this way,” insisted the Bandit. “I don’t want to have to hurt you….”

“Then
don’t
hurt me,” answered Arnold. “But you’re not getting my clothing without a fight. In either case, make up your mind. Because if you’re not going to kill me, I want to finish harvesting these boletes before it gets too light.”

The Bandit frowned and lowered his sword to Arnold’s navel. “You’re into mushrooms?” he asked suspiciously.

“I used to be,” replied the botanist. “I’m just getting into the swing of it again.”

Arnold’s assailant stepped forward and for a moment Arnold expected to be impaled on the lunatic’s sword. He braced himself for the pain. Instead, the Bandit used the weapon to poke at the heads of the boletes. He decapitated half the stand with one wide blow.

“You don’t want to be eating those, man. Better off drinking Drano.”

“Excuse me?” asked Arnold.

“They’re poisonous, man. Trust me. I’m something of an expert.” The Bandit pointed at the severed cap of the nearest bolete. “See those ridges on the underbelly. Well the rule is: ‘Bottom yellow, very mellow; bottom red, very
dead.’ It’s not always as easy as that, of course, because sometimes you get in-between shades. But here, I’d say that’s more of an orange-red than an orange-yellow….”

“I was debating that….”

“Mushroom eating isn’t for amateurs,” warned the Bandit. Arnold prickled at being called an amateur. “At least buy yourself a field guide….”

Arnold considered explaining that he wrote field guides, but it wasn’t worth it. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Unless you turn me into shish-kabob.”

The Bandit raised his saber again. The blade was extraordinary thin, as though designed for filleting fish, but Arnold didn’t doubt it could disembowel him with ease. “I saved your life, man,” said the lunatic. “Why not give me your clothes and call it even?”

“No,” answered Arnold. “I can’t do that.” He thought over the demand for another moment and added: “Why don’t you give me your sword?”

“What the hell?”

“You heard me,” said Arnold. “Give me your sword. Then I’ll let you go.”

“Don’t fuck with me, man,” warned the Bandit.

Arnold lowered his arms.

“Hands up!” shouted the Bandit.

“Calm down. I’m just going to have a cigarette.” Arnold reached into his jacket pocket for the girl’s lighter and her pack of Camels. “You want one?”

“You really do have a screw loose, man,” said the Bandit. “I could have killed you ten times by now.”

Arnold took a deep drag on his cigarette. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“Should I?” demanded the Bandit.

“I can’t say whether you
should
or you
shouldn’t
. But these days I’m known as the Tongue Terrorist.”

Arnold’s assailant examined the botanist closely. The lunatic actually circled him as though examining a sculpture. Then he sheathed his sword and whistled. “Wow, man,” said the Bandit. “I’m totally speechless. All I can say is Wow.”

“So you have heard of me?”

“Heard of you? I’m practically your number one fan. I own all of your books. Where do you think I learned so much about poisonous mushrooms?” The Bandit rubbed his eyes as though unsure that they were functioning properly. “Say, you must think I’m a total asshole for calling you an amateur.”

“No big deal,” said Arnold.

“You really are Arnold Brinkman, Ph.D., aren’t you?”

“Unfortunately,” answered Arnold. “It’s not exactly something I brag about these days.”

The Bandit braced his leg against a nearby log and rested his elbow on his bare knee. “What are you doing in the park at one o’clock in the morning?”

“Picking poisonous mushrooms,” Arnold answered.
He wasn’t sure how far to trust the lunatic—but they were both fugitives. It wasn’t as though the lunatic could walk over to the nearest police station and turn him in. They were bound by the same sort of self-interested secrecy that protected the patrons of gay bars and methadone clinics. On the other hand, the lunatic
was
a lunatic. “I’m actually
living
in the park these days,” he added. “Until I get back on my feet.”

“Where abouts?”