The Sky Below (23 page)

The milkmaid's jagged head rested in one of the cozier piles of more ordinary though still significant things that had developed around my apartment, on a bookshelf, on top of the refrigerator, on the back of the sofa: collections of shiny objects, feathers, small animal bones, cheap unraveling knit hats, and so on. This treasure had come not from Fleur's house but from the street. I thought these things might become part of a box one day, but I hadn't been able to interest myself in a box since I'd gotten out of the hospital; really, they were all emblems of my luck. I told my fortune from them. My vision for finding small things on the ground had sharpened considerably. Right on the sidewalks and streets, I'd discovered, were so many glittering stray things, and each item had my fate in it, yes or no. Well or ill. Living or dying. Thumbs up or thumbs down. One second to spot it, two seconds to see if it was a good sign or a bad one, two more to snatch it up before the juju drained out.

You'd be amazed how many talismans of fate are lying around city streets: single lost earrings, half-flattened pen tops, inscrutable and intriguing bits of metal, cowrie beads on a string, coins, lone keys, crosses, a curvy initial in gold plate (
T
), an intricate silver flower no bigger than your littlest fingernail, a star made out of rhinestones on a string covered in rhinestones. I grabbed all the yeses I saw shining on the concrete. I got incredibly good at it, incredibly fast, pecking at the pavement with lightning speed. I figured that between the flattened pen tops and the Steuben starfish, I had the range covered. Fate, manifested in seemingly innocuous objects, had no haven: I would find it and drag it from the immaterial to the material world.

My system covered events of all sizes as well. Three sunny days in a row meant I might be getting better, ditto finding a nickel heads-up on the street, or seeing a license plate with my initials on it. I wished on stars, eyelashes, wishbones. I threw coins into fountains. I decided, though I knew this was dicey, that if the smiley, dark-eyed Hispanic girl at the Starbucks near work waited on me, then I'd have a good day, but if it was her generally unsmiling, heavyset twin, who worked at the same Starbucks, then it would be a bad day. Sometimes I'd dump the latte made by the unsmiling twin into the gutter and go back in, hoping to get the smiling twin. (It didn't count if I asked for her.) Oh, I'd say in an abashed way, can you believe I dropped it the second I walked out of here? I must have been distracted. Winking, brushing at my pants, roguish smile.

I moved the black plastic pill bottle to the back, behind the headless milkmaid. I picked my way through the jungle of cables and made myself a maitake-extract protein shake and drank it down while glancing at the
New York Times
online. A picture of a sad polar bear on a tilting ice floe, a picture of an Iraqi soldier running from a burning building—nothing good. Slight chance of snow. It had been a snowless winter so far, another bad sign. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, the coming eclipse moved through its phases, back again, then re-eclipsed. In the corner of my living room, the dotted line, mute and motionless, hung in the middle of the television screen. Caroline and Carsten had gone to meet with some people in Greenpoint who were doing amazing work with noise, they said. I walked over to the windowsill and picked up the little bronze bell, rang it. Hello, universe. Hello.

No answer.

I put the bell back in its place. The protein shake tasted like damp, crumbling cardboard. I sat down on the sofa and watched the moon cover the sun, pulse of darkness, uncover it, pulse of light, cover it, uncover it. The gears in the transparent clock went
tick tick tick.
The moon covered the sun, pulse of darkness. Then it uncovered it, pulse of light.

 

“Gabriel, take the money.”

“No,” I said firmly. I tightened my lucky red scarf around my neck.

Caroline and I were walking down Henry Street. It was a weekday, but I had called in sick. (Well, now I really was sick, wasn't I? And the dead would still be dead tomorrow.) People passed us on their way to work, hair wet, some holding a child in one hand and a briefcase in the other, some already doing business on their cell phones. A stout black woman pushed a small, fragile curl of a very elderly white woman, covered in sweaters and blankets, in a wheelchair. The white woman looked like a seashell. The sound of hammering came from an upper floor in a grand white wood-frame house.

“And you haven't called Mom, either, right?” Caroline said.

“I've been busy.” Wishing on wishbones and counting clouds, scheming to get my latte from the right twin at Starbucks. Going in and out of the tank, diving down through layers of being. James had said my aura was much improved. “Plus, you say ‘take the money' like Janos is handing me cash in a paper bag. That's not what he means. He means move in with him.”

“What's the difference? He wants to support you. He wants to help you get better. Dependency is not a dirty word, Gabe. If you moved in with him, you could save the rent money and use it for the transfusion. They have this new kind now, they mix it—”

“Oh, my God, shut up about the
stupid
transfusion. How many times do I have to say it? Do you know who I really want to tell? Who I really want the money from?”

Caroline looked mystified. “Who? Did you tell Sarah?”

“No. Dad.”

“
Dad?
”

I smiled. It was hard to startle my unsinkable sister; I got pleasure from getting a rise out of her. “Yes. Dad. Remember him? We have half his DNA?”

Caroline snorted. “That train wreck. What a waste. Anyway, I think the man must be dead.”

Now it was my turn to be startled, and angry. “That is a horrible thing to say. God, Caroline. He's not
dead.
Can we sit down a minute?” We sat down on a stoop just before my knees gave out. The lion was like that, clawing unpredictably.

“When did
you
become such a fan? He walked out on us two days after Christmas, for God's sake, in that falling-down dollhouse with the mice and no heat—”

“The Bishop house? The Bishop house was great. It was so beautiful.”

“What planet are you on? That house was a shambles. The plumbing was a disaster, the basement was always flooding. Some contractor he was. After we went to Florida, Mom practically had to give it away, it went for so little. At least it was warm in Florida. You could be outside all the time.”

“What planet are
you
on? Brewster was a hellhole. Mom became a zombie. She never read us Ovid anymore—”

“Ovid? She never read
me
any Ovid. She was always in a rage. That's what I remember. After he left that winter, she kept me awake for hours telling me awful stuff about their marriage I didn't want to know. Sex stuff, even. Talk about myths. I hated it. Ovid?”

I nodded, embarrassed for both of us. But I couldn't stop myself from saying, “And the City. Remember the City?”

Caroline smiled ruefully. “Oh, right. She was always clever with the scissors and construction paper. She had an eye. Man, the two of them: how many dreamers can one marriage stand? But Gabe, that's why you have to tell her. She's impossible, but she's had such a tough time in the world, poor nervous thing.
To lose the husband and then—I'm sorry to say it, but I have to—maybe the son.”

“Why do you keep talking like that? He walked out. It's not the same thing at all.”

“Gabe.” Caroline shook my shoulder. “Gabe. Wake up. Doesn't it ever strike you as odd that after the first year or two we never heard from him? We heard he'd moved to Mexico and then . . .” She made a dial-tone sound. “People don't just morph. Things happen to them. What, did you think that all this time he was leading some other life as a circus clown in Arizona or something? That Zeus turned him into an antelope? He went to Mexico or some shit, who knows, and we never heard from him again. What does that sound like to you?”

The morning collapsed in bright pieces around me. “I don't know. I don't know what it sounds like.”

Caroline's expression softened. “Honey, do you think you can find him and tell him about . . . what's going on with you? Is that what you're saying? What would it matter?”

“He's my father,” I said. “Don't you think he'd want to know, that he'd want to help me out?” I let her think that I meant the transfusion.

“Some fathers, maybe. Not him.” She stretched her legs down the stoop, pointed her toes. “I don't know who you've made him into in your mind, but to me he was one of those guys who's hiding out all the time. Behind the beard, in the garage, out who knows where at night. He was a scuttler.” She shuddered. “And then he left all those beautiful guitars behind.” She shook her head. Case closed. “What did he think he was going to be? A rock star? The next Bob Dylan?”

I felt sliced to the quick. “You're wrong.”

“He did leave them behind, Gabe,” Caroline said softly. “You know that. Listen to me. Let Janos help you. You can't live like this. That apartment with all the creepy junk in it—”

I tossed the end of my lucky red scarf over my shoulder and
stood up. “Stop lecturing me, Caroline. I told you, I've been feeling better. And even if it isn't true, it doesn't help anything to make me feel worse. I'm trying to maintain a positive attitude. The mind-body connection—heard of it?”

“You're an asshole,” she said, but she followed me down the stoop to Pineapple Street anyway, like a reluctant shadow. I showed her how to stand by the lamppost up the block. I positioned her so she could get a full view. “I'm so in love with this house. Now look like we're talking.”

“What? Did you break into it or something? Is that where all the knickknacks came from? Is this like before?”

“No. Shhh. That was a long time ago. Come on, look like we're talking.” Though I was angry at her, I couldn't help but be excited. I kept my bid to myself, my sweet, pulsing secret.

“We
are
talking. All right, all right. Which one is it?”

I pointed, delicately, with a lift of my chin. I peeked at it over my shoulder and from under my eyelashes.

But instead of my house, with
FOR SALE BY OWNER
written on the sign outside, I saw a skeleton. Someone had carefully, methodically taken apart the house since I'd been here last. Someone—a giant, with a giant's hands, a giant's strength—had skinned it. For a second I thought my father must have come back and done it while I was sidelined in the hospital.

The front of the house was stripped to the sheathing. The porch had been removed, and in its place was a rough wooden staircase, braced in the dirt by long, raw pieces of wood, leading to the hole where the front door had been. The yard was bare, muddy, with big truck-tire tracks in it. The iron fence and gate were stacked in pieces, like firewood, along the right side of the yard. Most of the windows were gone, and in their place was thick, clear plastic. The plastic made the house look as if it was hibernating. The siding had been removed from the left side of the house, too, and in one part there were a few—well, what were they exactly? I couldn't tell. They looked like large
square tiles with a pinkish hue to them. If I had to guess, I'd say they were porcelain, but was that possible? Whatever they were, they made an odd mix with the old wooden widow's walk, still perched, like a battered hat, on the top of the house. The anchor was still there, and under the anchor it was still 1853. The large window on the lower left, one of the windows that had previously been the dim surface of a lake, was now a single, bright sheet of glass that stood open on the diagonal, like a sail. The house was sailing away.

Oh, God. I put my hands over my eyes. How had this happened? When could it have been done? This was what Alice had been trying to tell me in my vision. Termites wouldn't help me now. Nothing would help me. I plummeted.

Caroline, next to me, shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Gabe. This is
someone else's
house, right? Isn't someone else doing all this work?”

“Yes,” I said. “This is someone else's house.”

“Oh, man, you're just like Mom.” Caroline shook her head and walked away, back up the block and out of sight. I stared at the skeleton house until my vision blurred.

 

I called Carl and explained a few things to him, things I thought he should know, certain impressions, certain emotions. I tried to be quite clear.

Carl said, “You are crazy. If you ever bother me or my family again, I will have you arrested for harassment. Business is business. It's over, buster. Lose this number.”

I threw my phone over the railing of the Promenade into the river. If Pluto found it, I thought bitterly, he could fucking call me.

 

That night, at Janos's, I had a nightmare. In my nightmare, my old blood was emptying out through a tube, but there wasn't enough new blood coming in through the tube on the other
side. The plastic line was pinched in one spot. And I was hungry, so unbearably hungry. In my dream, I couldn't get enough to eat.

I woke up with a start, rolled over in bed, still terrified by the pinch in the plastic line, and put my arms around Janos, pressed his strong shoulder blades against my chest. The hair on his thighs was reassuringly thick, alive. The back of his neck smelled like starch and a hint of sweat. No pinch, I reminded myself. Look. No pinch anywhere here. Indeed, Janos was warm, solid, his blood flowing unimpeded through his veins. I wondered if I was actually hungry, if that was what had woken me up, but I wasn't. On the contrary, I felt slightly nauseated. My sour blood, I thought dismally, was making me sick. My fright, like my hunger in the dream, expanded, inflating just beneath my ribs until it seemed one might crack. Oh fuck, I thought, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

I got out of bed, naked. Janos's house was dark, the furniture hooded by the night. A few glowing red dots near the living room ceiling indicated that the security alarm was on. I wanted to run out of there as fast as I could, just run until I reached the top or the bottom of the island, plunge my arms into the water, splash the filthy, beautiful river water on my face, but instead I rushed into the atrium. The glass door went
thush
behind me. I leaned against one of the glass walls, my face in my hands. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. My ribs hurt. The swollen nodule on the inside of my left thigh seemed bigger, and it hurt. I crouched down, ass in the dirt. The Tweeties were asleep, heads tucked into their feathered breasts.
Brothers,
I whispered in bird language, but they didn't stir. The fan was off. Nothing moved. The air was just barely humid.