Tuesday Nights in 1980 (25 page)

“They're your friends in there?” James asked, worried. He was always worried, Engales thought. One of those people who was always worried.

“Only a matter of time, I guess.”

There was the
blip blip blip
of the siren used halfway, then the sagging clangs of key rings and the thick thunks of heavy boots. They watched the cops bang with their mad hands on the squat's blue door—the door Selma had painted at 7:00
A.M.
one morning because she had dreamed of a blue door and had to realize the dream immediately—then kick through it. With his left hand, Engales struggled to pop the window open; at the Rising Sun, you were only allowed a crack, lest you lose your shit and try to jump out.

“BAD DAY TO STEAL A CHANDELIER, BUDDY.” Engales could hear the cop's barrely voice, perhaps genetically modified to sound like
asshole,
all the way from here. “REAL BAD DAY.”

“Crap,” said James Bennett. “Will they go to jail?”

“You're the type who's scared of cops, aren't you?” Engales said. The cold air slithered all over them.

“I had a feeling about today,” James said. “I woke up to purple.”

“When you talk like a crazy person,” Engales said, eyes on the cops' backs as they filed in the door. “It's hard to be around you. It really is.”

“Did you know they're putting Jean-Michel in a
movie
now?” James said, turning to look at Engales pleadingly.

“What's that got to do with anything?” Engales said. He did not particularly want to think about Jean-Michel Basquiat's cinematic debut, or his rising fame, or anything happening out in the world that did not include him.

“I'm saying that this”—James opened his hand toward the window—“is going to happen everywhere. To everything. The buildings, the artists themselves, everything is going to be stolen, or at least bought. The money's coming downtown, and it'll be this, over and over again. Everything's going to change, is what I'm saying. Just watch.”

They watched. The blue tarps from the squat's second-floor windows puffed in the wind. The cops had gone inside now, and left the front door open behind them, and Engales imagined the cold air blowing into the squat's common room, the chill that outdid the space heaters and crept under sweaters, no matter how many you piled on. When it was cold like this, back when Engales spent every spare moment at the squat, they'd have the Swedes build one of their massive fires on the concrete slab in the back; outside with fire was warmer than inside without. Not that warmth had mattered much to them. They had had one another, and they had their projects, and they had this space they could make their own—these were the things that kept them from freezing.

Engales realized this bust was an opportunity for relief: finally the squat would stop taunting him from across the street. Finally he'd be able to sleep without imagining what might be happening over there, wondering what he was missing. For three weeks he'd been listening to the sounds of his old life seeping through the window's crack—Selma's cosmic howling, parties raging until the aching hours of the night, an experimental poetry reading during which everyone had yelled in unison: “VERY UNNERVING. VERY UNNERVING. VERY UNNERVING INDEED!” And now he could be free of that; if not peace of mind, there would at least be silence.

But he didn't feel relief now, as he waited for his friends to be escorted out of the place they'd spent the last years turning into a manifestation of their dreams. He felt only deep, unexpected sadness, if not for their loss than for the fact that he could not partake in it. He had helped make the squat during the time he'd spent there—the kitchen shelves, the handwoven hammock, the studio walls—and so he should be there when it got destroyed. He should be there, mouthing off to the cops with Toby, standing in front of Selma so they wouldn't cuff her. Instead, he was here, in his own private hell across the street, trapped with a bunch of drunks and lunatics and people with giant limps or missing limbs, watching his old life like a voyeur with an obsessive failed writer. How had this become
him
? How was this his
life
? Why, and how, was he
here
?

Because of Winona George.

Because of Winona George, Raul Engales had not died by way of painkiller overdose three weeks ago, on the night of the show that would have been his artistic debut. Instead, Winona had found him passed out and drooling on a stoop on Bond Street, while stiletto-stepping toward a yellow cab. She'd dragged him into the car herself and instructed the cabbie to drive with meteoric speed to St. Vincent's.

“That cabbie didn't have the slightest idea what meteoric meant,” Winona relayed after Engales's stomach had been forcefully pumped at the same hospital where they had sewn up his arm. (
Practically a regular here
, one nurse tried to joke.) “But he still drove like hell,” Winona went on. “And thank god for that, or you would have been a dead man.”

“If only,” Engales had said.

“Oh, don't say that,” Winona had said. “Things got bad there for a second, I know, darling. But there's still a life to be lived. And you're in good hands now.”

Whose good hands?
Engales wanted to say. The hands of the handsome hospital doctors, whose capableness was a threat to Engales's very being? Winona's, whose mauve manicure made him actually nauseous? Some god's? Who had already proved himself either nonexistent or evil? Good hands, Engales thought while gazing up into the hollow caves of Winona's cheekbones from the hospital bed, did not exist anymore.

But Winona had disagreed. There was hope for Raul Engales yet—more life to be lived and more fame to be had, if only he got some help. She was adamant: he would be admitted somewhere where he could recover and rehabilitate; she would foot the bill.

And so it was because of Winona George that Engales was not sent home to François's apartment but to the Rising Sun (or as the people at the squat had called it, the
Rubber Room
, both because it housed the neighborhood's crazier set and because the clinic on the first floor gave out condoms for free). Here he was to endure the depressing aesthetic blend of homespun hospitality and medical sterility that he expected was common in New York City wellness institutions: peppy construction paper signage (
IF IT'S YELLOW LET IT MELLOW
, read one, in the communal bathroom), hospital-blue sheets, jail-thin mattresses, glass mobiles that reflected colorful light onto his face in the morning. He was to share a small room with an ex-alcoholic roommate named Darcy, who sang gospel before going to bed every night and shined his shoes after every time he wore them. He was to take orders and pills from a fantastically bitchy nurse named Lupa, whose Mexican Spanish was both lazy and lippy and whose nose was almost as wide as her face. And he was to attend therapy of all kinds: talk therapy with a man named Germond Germond, who had told Engales, absurdly,
you can just call me Germond
; art therapy (it couldn't get more ironic) with Carmen Rose, who never once spoke but did an incredible amount of nodding and tempera paint mixing; and physical therapy with Debbie, a peppy blond sports trainer who attempted to train his left hand into a one-man show by making him turn the knobs of an Etch A Sketch. “It's different with everyone,” Debbie said sweetly when Engales asked her how fucking long this was going to take. “We need to retrain your mind to understand your new body. It's a process.”

But Engales didn't want to understand his new body, or his new life, or undergo any process at all. He did not want to hear the sounds of a party at the squat while he tried to fall asleep. He did not want to do therapy, of any kind. And he especially did not want to be cooped up in a little room for hours with the awful images that triangled around in his mind: the terror of the white suit jacket, leading Lucy off into the night; his childhood house, empty on the other end of the phreak-tapped pay phone; the silver blade of the guillotine, slamming down onto his arm; Franca's eggs, their bleeding yolk. And so he'd shut his eyes with force, but under the lids he'd just get a more jumbled version of the images that haunted him. Jacket, ringing, yolk/blood. Germond, Germond, yolk, jacket. Lupa's nose, jacket, Etch A Sketch, blood.
Meet me at the squat, midnight at the squat, four in the morning at the squat, never again at the squat
.
Hallelujah,
white yolk, red yolk, THIS IS UNNERVING, Lupa's cigarette smell, ringing, ringing, ringing, gone.

But then, on
the Tuesday of his second week there, the hellish rhythm of his rehabilitation was interrupted, when a man showed up toward the end of visiting hours, covered in rain. Something about him was familiar, but Engales couldn't place him at first. Around the cuffs of the man's slacks, little moats formed.

“Sorry about this,” the man said, motioning at the dripping. “I lost my umbrella. Maybe I never had one? I never know with umbrellas.”

Lupa tucked her head into the room. “Thees is Meester James Bennett,” she said in her I'm-a-hard-ass voice. “Miss George lady sends him. Be nice.”

Engales's heart flapped ever so slightly.
James Bennett.
That's why the man looked familiar: Engales flashed on the New Year's Eve party, when Rumi had listed off the important people on the balcony. He remembered Bennett's slumped silhouette, his shiny head. He thought of Winona's promise: an article in the
Times
, by the most
revered
art writer, all about his show. Engales bristled, first with the sort of hope he felt when he woke up in the morning: ten bright seconds during which a writer from the
New York Times
was here to write an article about
him.

Engales reached for a towel that hung on the doorknob of the closet, threw it at the man. He caught it, rubbed it over his shoulders, down his legs. Then the ten bright seconds faded, as quickly as they'd arrived. James Bennett could only be here to write about one thing: the accident, the hand. He imagined headlines—“Failed Painter Lands in Loony Bin.” “Crippled Artist Never to Paint Again.” “Hand and Career Severed.”
Read all about it.
He then imagined Lucy picking up the paper and seeing his sob story on the front page. There would be a close-up of his wrinkled arm, the black notches of the stitches appalling and obvious, Frankensteinian. He suddenly felt violated—the same way he had felt when the Telemondo guy didn't tell his penny joke. The world would forever treat him differently, look at him differently; the hand would define him from here on out. The hand would be his only story.

“I'm not doing interviews,” Engales said quickly then, averting James Bennett's gaze.

“Me neither,” said James, taking off his tiny round glasses to rub the water from his face.

“Then what are you doing here?” Engales said.

“Well,” James Bennett said breathlessly, as if he had just climbed many flights of stairs. “To tell you the truth, I'm trying to figure out the meaning of my life.”

Just then, when James Bennett returned his glasses to his face, Engales saw it: the telltale registering of the missing hand, which was laid out on the arm of Engales's chair like a pink dick. This was the pattern: normal face, wide-eyed frightened face, rejiggered fake normal face, then sinking face. James Bennett had not known about the accident. He wasn't here to write about the accident.

Usually there was a final resting stage: the eyebrow-tilt of
pity.
But James Bennett's face didn't move into the final stage. Instead, it shifted into a wide-eyed, slack-mouthed expression of what could only be considered
awe.

“Shit,” James said.

Engales watched skeptically as James Bennett's pale face contorted into a sort of euphoric mess: all eye-bulging and nostril-flaring and cheek-scrunching.

“It's happening,” James said.

“
What's
happening?” Engales asked; he was too curious not to.

“Um,” James managed, screeching a chair around next to Engales's, padding his wet loafers across the linoleum, sitting, the whole time keeping his buggy eyes on Raul Engales's face. Engales could feel the tug of the stitches in his arm, like they could burst.

“It's like a crown,” James said, his head tilting. “Or kind of a halo. It's sort of a golden color. It's beautiful. It's like the blue room. I knew it!”

Engales scooted his chair away a bit; the linoleum screamed. “You're officially freaking me out,” he said. “So unless you tell me what the hell you're talking about, I'm going to call Lupa back in.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” James said, taking off his glasses again to rub his eyes. “I'm being odd, aren't I? I can't help it. I just feel so much. You're making me feel so much.”

“Lupa!” Engales yelled to the door, but Lupa didn't come.

James jumped into an explanation: He had a sort of disability, he explained. No, an
ability.
He had an ability to see things that weren't there, to hear things and to feel things and to smell things that did not exist in the real world. His wires were crossed, he explained. Like a switchboard operator who hooked the wrong two people up for conversation, and those two people ended up hitting it off.

Engales watched him, still highly skeptical. Rumi had been right on New Year's when she had called James Bennett an odd duck. And yet Engales felt something he hadn't felt in a while. He felt warm. Ever since the accident, he had been cold, as if his wound were an open window out of which all his body heat escaped. Now, in James Bennett's presence, he felt his blood heating.

Just then Lupa blasted in, flared her nose and declared that visiting hours ended at precisely one o'clock and it was now
one oh five
and Mary Spinoza was going to fry her ass like a
chicharrón
if Bennett didn't get out on the double. James stood, leaving a little puddle of rain where his ass had been, and reached out to shake Engales's hand.