The Sky Below (15 page)

“Fleur? Fleur?”

She snorted, woke. “Rape Natasha. What do you think? Would that work?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “What about Miranda instead?”

She nodded slightly, like a general acknowledging a foot soldier. “Possibly.” Her
s
's slipped, leaned drunkenly against
one another. “Not a bad idea. Gabe, when's your birthday?” She pushed herself up the slope of shining pillows, wide awake now.

“November.”

“Tell Morty we should throw you a party. Listen. Did I ever tell you what Morty was doing when we met?”

I sat back. “No, what?” I said. I liked this one.

“Fixing my sister's car. Yeah. He was a car mechanic, dating my sister Myra. He doesn't know shit about clocks, except the big hand is on the hour and the little hand is on the minute. Even that, I'm not so sure.” She laughed.

“Was he a good mechanic?”

“That he could do. He got Myra's motor running, that's for sure. She almost killed me for stealing him.” She laughed again, ruefully. “God, I miss her.”

“I know.”

“Longest legs you've ever seen. Like a dancer.” Fleur sighed. “Ovarian.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “I hope she didn't suffer.”

“She did suffer,” said Fleur. “She suffered terribly. You can't imagine how much she suffered. Now Barbara, she was the smart one. She invested
very wisely.
Guess what in.”

“What?” Recycling.

“Recycling. Is that amazing or what? Very forward-thinking.” She tapped her forehead with her good hand. “Pancreatic.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Horrible.”

“It was. Like being hit by a train. Her kids are nightmares. If they ever call you, don't call them back.” A melancholy expression crossed her face.

“What about Linda?” Linda had been the oldest, Fleur's favorite.

Fleur brightened up right away. “Oh, she was kind. Biggest heart you ever saw. She did everything for us. Brushed our hair,
got us ready for school, told us what was what. She figured out a way to send us all to summer camp upstate, sewed our names on our shirts: Linda, Barbara, Myra, Rebecca. Us four girls, we were a team. Couldn't get a piece of paper between us. You know what happened to Linda.”

“She died in her sleep,” I said. “The day after Christmas.”

“That's right. When's your birthday?” With her good hand, she fussed at a bit of cashmere. “Too hot.”

I covered her good hand with mine. “Fleur.”

She frowned. “I'm sleepy.”

“My birthday is in November. Fleur. You know I'm an artist. Or trying to be.” I winked in the roguish way she liked.

She yawned. “Yeah.” Her eyelids were lowering again.

“And you know how tough that is, how I work all the time. Fleur?” I jostled her lightly. “Fleur. It's tough. And art supplies are so expensive.” I waited, but nothing happened. She watched me, half asleep, half awake, like the white cat I never saw. “I'm wondering if we could double my fee? Since I've helped you out so much?”

“No,” she said, quite clearly.

I tightened my grip on her good hand, to keep her from slipping away into sleep. Her gaze widened. “But the thing is, well, you know, I really have helped you a lot. And that's a private thing between us, how much I help you. How much I want to keep helping you. I love the
Stolen
girls—I can't wait to read the next one, even though I know what happens. I worship you, Fleur. I admire you tremendously. But if it were ever to become
less
private, this thing of ours”—I gestured to the invisible bridge between us, to our unseen fused bones—“then I wouldn't be able to help you anymore. And that would break my heart. You can't imagine how much I look forward to our time together. It's my secret life. But, wow, it really has to stay a secret, doesn't it?” I clucked my tongue. “You're the star. I want to make sure we keep it that way.”

“Linda,” she said, taking her time to enunciate the syllables. “Barbara, Myra, Rebecca. I'm the last one.” She shook her head against a gold silk pillow. “Jesus Christ. Gabe. Jesus Christ.”

I didn't say anything, maintaining my grip on her hand. With an effort, she withdrew her fingers from mine, reached behind one of the gold silk pillows, and pulled out an envelope. Then, slowly but deliberately, she reached back in and pulled out another. “Here you go, my boy. When are you coming back?”

I took the envelopes. I gently plucked the flash drive from the curl of her left hand. “How about in a week?”

“Make it two.” Her eyelids began to lower again.

“Fleur. Thank you.”

“Forget it, kid. Did we say Natasha or Miranda?”

“Miranda.”

“All right. All right. Come back in a week.”

“Okay.”

“No—make it two.” She reached for my hand, grabbed it, and squeezed. Her small bones pressed hard against my fingers. “We'll throw you a birthday party in November. Big party.”

“Great.” I saw myself through room after silent room. In the room with the grand piano, I spotted an intricate cut-glass pineapple. I slipped it into my pocket. I continued on, past the enormous white sofas like clouds, down the ornate elevator, through the echoing lobby, and out into the street. Central Park West regarded me with its wide, blank, guarded stare. I patted the reassuringly heavy envelopes in my breast pocket. I loved the money, I loved the money, I loved the money. Fleur and I had that in common. She loved the money too. Underneath, she understood why I had to do what I had to do. Why should Morty get it all? To buy more clocks? All I was doing was borrowing against the time we might not get to have together, because of an accident of age and the body. Time wasn't my fault.

I made my way home, pleased. Third Avenue, Second Avenue, down Seventh Street, up my battered stoop and the cracked marble stairs in the grimy hallway with the fluorescent ring lights (two were always out) and into my precious rent-controlled apartment. Caroline's name was still on the mailbox in her blocky handwriting. Fifteen years ago, the three largeish rooms had needed a paint job; now they needed that and plastering, too, but I had no intention of alerting the landlord to my existence. I still signed Caroline's checks, a small hoard from an ancient bank account, for the rent.

In through my heavy front door. Early evening. The gate over the back window, rusted shut, threw shadows on the floor. The plastic clock hovered, as ever, between 4:37 and 4:38. All the furniture had been salvaged from the street—great finds, amazing finds—except for one expensive throw pillow ornamented with a plain blue triangle and a wall clock that looked as if it had been made out of bicycle spokes. I think it actually was made out of bicycle spokes, and it had been quite expensive, a gift from Janos. I looked around without turning on any lights. My house. It looked as if it was all made out of shadows.

I took the cut-glass pineapple out of my pocket and put it on the windowsill, as if to ripen, next to the other
objets
I'd collected from Fleur's house—trinkets, really. She would never miss them; some overpaid interior designer had selected most of them. But as I eased the pineapple into place, a porcelain milkmaid with spreading, deep blue skirts fell and broke. Her head rolled under the radiator. Damn. On hands and knees, I retrieved her head, covered in under-the-radiator crud, but her neck was hopelessly shattered. I set her head, rolling awkwardly, next to her smooth porcelain body. Then I took the two envelopes of money Fleur had given me out of my breast pocket, wrapped them first in tin foil, then in a plastic Gristede's bag, then in another layer of foil. I opened the freezer door and added the thick, oblong aluminum bundle to the others and tapped it into place. The silvery bundles were stacked,
mute and heavy, in neat rows, shrouded in ice. The freezer was nearly full. I needed to push a bit to close the freezer door, but at last it clicked shut. It was going to go twice as fast now. I might have to get another freezer, maybe a little portable one, just for the money.

 

In a way, it was the money wrapped in aluminum foil that drew me into the wrong grove. Money has its own animus, its own gravitational pull, its own will to live. I worked on Wall Street, after all; the evidence surrounded me every day of how willful money is, how it gathers force as it accumulates, like a creature assembling itself out of the dust, bit by bit.

Money has its own ideas, its own plans. Hadn't it frozen the bull in place on Bowling Green? And I liked the money so much. At the beginning, I had half thought, or told myself, that I could use it to buy some time to work on my boxes—I knew I should want to use it for that—but after the first few months of stacking silver bricks on old freezer ice, I had had to admit that I didn't want to spend it yet. I liked thinking of things I could do with the money. I liked the secret weight of it, liked the fact that no one knew I had it, in the same way that I liked the trinkets of Fleur's that I'd curated and set out on my windowsill. It had been just over a year that I'd been stacking up silver bricks, and I didn't want to stop. Ever.

It was part of another world, that money—a world that no one else could see and that wasn't entirely visible even to me. But I could feel that world, its curves and spires, pressing against the inside of this one. I glimpsed it from time to time. And it wasn't like the money had been
given
to me; I didn't steal it, either. I'd earned it, and I was overdue for a raise. Fleur's books, including the one I'd helped her write, sold boatloads of copies. It was all on the up-and-up. The money, shiny and cold, was simply an
if.
The
if
was a door. As the money stacked up, it had persuaded me to enjoy the idea that I could, one day,
swing the
if
open. The money wasn't wrong. I mean, wouldn't you want a door like that? Wouldn't everyone? Money knows that. It knows all about you and what you really want. It knows, for instance, that you'd rather not be caught off guard, helplessly peeing in your pants on a cold day. It is never, ever still but always moving, always changing: now an open door, now a mirror, now a loyal dog, now a busy city, now you, now me.

And then the door did swing open. A crooked door, that small, grave girl: that's all it took to pull me across the river for good.

 

I stared out my dirty office window in the city of the dead on a Tuesday afternoon. Wall Street burbled and bustled below, businessmen shoving right through the ghosts on the sidewalk, elbowing them out of the way as they wolfed down sandwiches from the carts and gossiped about what money was getting up to today. My gaze had to leap the South Street Viaduct, the ferry slips, the gray river, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but then there it was: the land of the living, bounded on the south by the Brooklyn Bridge and the enormous tan building with the letters that read
THE WATCHTOWER
, that badly printed weekly booklet handed out on streets and at doorsteps by Jehovah's Witnesses; and on the north by industrial buildings.

One day not long after I'd gotten my raise from Fleur, still feeling restless and ill at ease, haunted by I didn't know what, I stared across at the city of the living and willed my spirit onto those wide, leafy streets, willed my body to follow my spirit somewhere, anywhere. It didn't. My spirit snapped back into my body and landed with a dull thud. I was in my same old cubicle, with the same fuzzy, beige half-walls. I still had the Band-Aid on my finger. The kneeling figures of Agriculture and Mining were nearby. I straightened my brown tie. It was 4:56.

I played some online poker (I lost), cropped a picture or two of famous people who weren't dead yet, and then, as if blown by a gust of wind, grabbed my things and left the building (“Dentist appointment!” I yelled into Sydnee's office), sending my body in search of my spirit. People on those long rides under the river from Manhattan to Brooklyn often doze, lulled by the motion and the length of the trip home. I liked it. I let other people lean drowsily against me as I watched the stops tick by. I got off at Clark Street. As soon as I came up through the St. George Hotel and saw the great brownstones, like ancient towering redwoods, I felt that satisfying click, that release. Yes. Here.

I made my way down Clark Street, Henry Street, Love Lane (Love Lane! Who would dare it?), and then, whistling, onto Pineapple Street. I took out my one cigarette, getting ready, and hurried to the lamppost. I turned up my collar; chillier today. But as I cupped my hands and bent to the match, I noticed something. Two things, actually. First I noticed that the widow's walk had been fixed. That two-by-four had been replaced by a nicely turned white post that nearly matched its fellows except for a slight brightness, like a new tooth. Good, I thought, but then my gaze fell on the other thing, the hand-lettered sign in the front yard:
FOR SALE BY OWNER
, and a phone number written underneath.

I shook the match out, the unlit cigarette between my lips. The uneasy thrum I'd been feeling for weeks deepened, intensified. The red patch on my arm (which had been getting bigger, it needed some cream or something) itched ferociously in protest. I scratched it. My ears began to ring. What would a house like this go for? For sale by owner. Something about that phrase bothered me, suggesting as it did a certain greed. Or was it an opportunity? My pulse quickened. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I felt a sudden urge to piss.

The dark green front door opened. The little girl walked
out of the house. She was wearing purple and white leggings, a pink skirt, a second, turquoise skirt on top of the first, a stretchy yellow shirt with orange sleeves and a big blue dog appliquéd on the front, five plastic bracelets in tropical hues, and a red macramé beret on her head. Lavender high-top sneakers. In her hand was a lighted square of computer that seemed to be singing; an intricate design coiled and uncoiled on the screen. She walked down the steps and stood at the gate. On her face was an expression of anticipation mixed with melancholy. She looked up the street, down the street. She ran her hand along the top of the gate, closed her eyes in the manner of a child making a wish, opened them.