Twelve (12 page)

Chapter Seventy

EVERYBODY TOOK ETHICS
in the eleventh grade. It was a requirement.
Why,
White Mike wondered. White Mike was always bored in his ethics class, but he faked it and was sailing through with an A until the day's topic was organized religion: discrimination, belief, freedom, all that. White Mike slumped back in his chair and listened as his peers tried to articulate their thoughts about how they liked the moral values of Christianity but still thought religion was the
opium
of the masses. The black girl in the class, on scholarship, started talking about how she went to church every Sunday and sang, and how there was a sense of community. White Mike was in a bad mood. He raised his hand, and everyone looked at him, because whenever he talked, it was something different.

“The problem is that religion is just a cop-out. So is community. It's just out of loneliness, you know, something to hold on to when you can't do it yourself. It's for weak people. Strength in adhering to values? No, it's not.” The black girl looked close to tears. The teacher
was trying to interrupt, but White Mike wasn't stopping. He looked the teacher right in the eye.
Look what I'm about to do.

“Because really, when you get down on your knees on the pew, you're just giving God a blow job.”

“Get out, Mike,” said the teacher, pointing to the door. “Just get out.”

Chapter Seventy-One

WHITE MIKE KNOWS
there will be no skateboarders at night in the winter, but when he calls this kid Andrew back, he tells him to meet at the amphitheater in the park where the skaters go. White Mike gets there early and stands on the stage and looks around at the benches and the snow, still unbroken in places, reflecting blue and white from the light of streetlamps.

White Mike sees the kid coming from a long way off, looking all around, over his shoulder and everything. White Mike rolls his eyes at the kid's approach.
Why did I tell the kid to meet me here
, wonders White Mike.
It's like the damn movies. Except it's a fifty. Right
.

Andrew thinks,
Damn, this is a drug deal
when he sees the tall pale guy in the dark overcoat standing in the shadows of the theater.

“Hello.” Andrew can't think of anything else to say.

“Hi.” White Mike has never had a kid say hello before.

“Umm, well, here you go.” Andrew hands over the money.

White Mike looks in the kid's eyes. “You're not going to do this ever again, are you?”

“I hope not. No offense or anything.”

“You might not even be the one smoking this, right?”

“No, probably.” Andrew hadn't expected the dealer to be so talkative.

“But since you're not about to be a regular, you want to tell me something?”

“Should we be just standing around here like this?”

“It's fine. But we can walk. I know you want to go. But you can walk with me out of the park. Andrew, right?”

“I guess.” They start walking.

“Why the weed?”

“A girl I know wanted it, so I'm sort of picking it up for her.”

“She shouldn't smoke it if she's not brave enough to buy it.”

“I don't know.”

“If that's enough for you, then good, I guess.”

“What?”

“Well, your life is about girls.”

“No, it's not.”

“You're out buying weed for one.”

“Yeah, but there's more.”

“What?”

“Well, everything. New Year's Eve tomorrow.”

“So?”

“I don't know what the fuck you're talking about—”
Andrew stops short and reminds himself,
You're talking to a drug dealer
.

White Mike shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn't say anything.

A light snow begins falling as they turn out of the park at Seventy-second Street. The flakes are very white in the air, falling through the light of the lamps, and the soft sound that comes with snow descends.

“Good luck with the girl.”

“Yeah. Thanks for the weed.”

“Anytime.”

“Good luck to you too, I guess, in dealing or whatever. I hope it works out.”

White Mike turns downtown, and Andrew watches the snowflakes pile on the shoulders of his overcoat as he walks away.

That must be the wackest drug dealer ever
, thinks Andrew.

Chapter Seventy-Two

WHITE MIKE WENT
to Times Square the previous New Year's Eve. It was what he expected, a huge drunken confluence of humanity, hookers and crooks and fools from the bridges and tunnels and, of course, teenage drug dealers. White Mike arrived in Midtown on the late side, so he couldn't get anywhere near Times Square itself. The mass of bodies extended blocks and blocks in every direction. White Mike wondered if Dick Clark somehow soaked up all this energy from doing it year after year and that was what made him look maybe forty years younger than he actually was. Anyway, there was an energy. White Mike liked it. He liked moving through the crowds alone, sneaking through the police barricades and watching everything flow by around him.

The crowd extended up to Central Park South, and White Mike climbed a tree on the park side and sat in it looking down Seventh Avenue and could just make out Times Square. It wasn't snowing, but the cold was blistering, and White Mike wished for a second that he smoked, because he bet it would have made him warmer.

When the ball dropped, the crowd below went wild and White Mike watched everybody make out. It was cold, but White Mike liked it in the tree, so he stayed there for a long time and watched the crowd disperse in all the different directions. When he came down and started walking home, the city was still wired, and there were crowds of people in the park, and in front of the dome where the skaters came, there were a lot of people dancing. On the stage was some terrible salsa band with a thumping techno beat and lights flashing on the dancers. The crowd was young and old, everybody drunk and dancing in the freezing cold. White Mike was almost tempted to dance but didn't and kept walking. When he got over to Fifth Avenue, he decided against going home and headed back downtown. It was very bright, and there were still crowds moving across the city like small storms.

Outside an expensive restaurant, White Mike saw a lady with a lined face and knit gloves biting her thumb and crying. She looked terrified and reminded White Mike of the refugees he had seen on CNN. Her hair was pulled back, but wisps of it were flying loose, and her scrunched-up face was so terrible and haunting that White Mike looked at her twice. He realized that she was whimpering and biting her way through the glove, and he thought that her thumb must be getting all mangled. Next to her, two couples in evening clothes were walking into the restaurant.

White Mike turned back into the crowds of people. He wanted to be far away. Just way the fuck gone from
this whole city. This place where people chewed off their own hands while the people next to them sipped champagne in tuxedos.

Get hold of yourself,
he thought
. Don't be an asshole.

Chapter Seventy-Three

ON THE WAY
home from selling to Andrew, White Mike is thinking about loneliness. He is feeling the change in his pocket. The streets are almost empty, but there is always someone out. Because there are millions of people here.

How many is a million
, thinks White Mike.
What are there millions of? People. Pigeons. Pennies. Everybody knows what a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building can do. So if it started to rain pennies, millions of pennies, and these tiny bronze disks were streaking to the earth, catching the sunlight, the bronze rain would explode into the pavement and leave craters and you would run for cover. And there you would be, hiding under some overhang with everyone else who has run for cover, pressed in against the other bodies taking shelter. If it started raining money
.

White Mike didn't spend much time down at the restaurants with his dad anymore. It just wasn't worth it to go there and pretend to work, because the work his
father put him to was so easy that White Mike finished it in no time. And what was the point? To learn the business? His dad never noticed when he left, just so long as White Mike had dinner with him every once in a while, usually in an Italian restaurant a few blocks from home. And White Mike never asked for spending money, so that wasn't a problem. And the restaurants were always there, so he was busy that way if he needed to be.

A month ago, White Mike's father told him that instead of going to work, they should do something else, spend some time together. Doing what, his father didn't say. White Mike got up at ten and his father got up at twelve, and by the time his father was ready to go out, it was one. They didn't talk much at lunch, except for his father running down some problems with one of the restaurants. They got back home around three-thirty, and then the phone rang and White Mike's father took the call in his room.

White Mike heard the sibilant S's through the door as his father spoke on the phone with his girlfriend. It was quiet, but the hissing sound carried through the apartment. White Mike knew his father wouldn't come out of his room, so he sat with his back against the opposite wall and his feet touching the closed door. He sat and listened to his father but not the words, just the sound through the door, like gas escaping some fractured mechanism. White Mike wondered what his father had to talk about for so long, because as he sat there
,
the sun, which was casting short white squares of light from the windows, dropped low, and the light lengthened and faded, and White Mike watched it creep to his leg and spill over onto his knees and pass him completely and continue up the floor. And it was just so fucking lonely, the light lengthening and darkening. When he heard the click of the receiver, White Mike got up quickly and went to his room, where he kept checking his beeper, hoping for a call.

White Mike's father apologized later for the phone call, but he knew his son would understand, and you know, Mike, how it is with women.

Chapter Seventy-Four

ON THE TWENTIETH
floor at Eighty-first and Third Avenue, Molly leans her head out the window way up there in the sky and looks toward the park, halfway across town. She has taken out her contact lenses, so the sharp headlights of the cars are out of focus and the street appears to her a great river of lights, shimmering circles of yellow and red, obscuring the shapes of the cars and the edges of the building and all the people. The circles speed past beneath her, and the sounds of the street and the horns rise from them, but way up there in the sky, without her glasses on or her contacts in, the movement of the lights is so smooth that the sharp sounds seem disjointed, not to fit with anything.

Molly wears clothing very well, though she never picks it out in advance. But tonight she is trying on different outfits for the next night, and ten minutes after she has begun, she looks in the mirror and sees herself trying on a short black skirt and a tank top and jutting her hips out to the side. She double-takes in the mirror, furrows her eyebrows, and yells at the reflection, “I am
not a tank-top girl! I am not, I am not,” and she rips off all her clothing and tosses the tank top out the window and stands there naked and cold. She sticks her head out the window to see where the garment has landed. It is in the trees, twenty stories down. Molly gets into bed and sleeps naked.

Part V

New Years Eve

Chapter Seventy-Five

WHITE MIKE DIDN'T
do drugs, but Hunter did once in a while. The most important time was one night last December. Hunter told White Mike what he was going to do, and White Mike said he was a fool, but Hunter was determined, so White Mike was of course going to watch out for him. They started at Ninety-sixth Street on Park, looking all the way down to the MetLife Building at the bottom, beyond all the lights on the trees. They started late so the street would be deserted. It was a Sunday night, with a full moon, and it was really very bright outside, with the lights and the moon and everything. And then Hunter started tripping out, which was the plan, and White Mike started walking him down the divider in the middle of Park Avenue, weaving him among the lighted trees and stopping him whenever cars raced by.

Every time a car passed by, it seemed to Hunter that the noise was as loud as thunder. The sky was so clear there couldn't be a storm coming, but the thunder he
heard was so loud. And then he saw clouds, thick and black, start rolling across the sky, and covering up the stars, but the moon was so bright that when it was covered, it was like the moon had blasted out a hole in the clouds. And then, only for Hunter, a light drizzle started to fall.

White Mike was watching his friend. Hunter kept looking up like he was afraid, as if something were coming out of the sky, but not rain. So White Mike looked up too, and he saw the stars. He recalled some melodramatic kid in his class, maybe actually Hunter, who had written in an English assignment that the stars never shine over New York, or that it was so bright you couldn't see them. But White Mike could see them now, so he thought what a crock that was. You can always see the stars if you want. It's just that no one is out late enough to get a good look at them. And a big van rolled by fast.

And Hunter felt the crack of thunder in his bones, and with it, the sky split and the rain really started coming down, and he could see White Mike walking next to him, and it was like all the moonlight was shining on him and keeping him dry, because now it was raining so hard that the streets were starting to flood, though White Mike was still dry. Hunter felt the water start rising to his knees. And as they passed the next tree wrapped in lights, it burst into flame, and as the water rose to quench the flames, the smoke was unbearable, and Hunter frantically waved his hands in front of his face to clear the smoke.

White Mike watched Hunter waving his hands and grabbed his shoulder to stop him from walking into the street before the light turned. Down on the MetLife Building there was a huge cross of lights. White Mike hadn't noticed the cross before, and he thought it was weird not to notice until now.

When Hunter emerged from the smoke, he had to push through the water because it was up to his hips, and the cross down the avenue jumped out at him from behind the burning trees, and the MetLife sign above it expanded, and Hunter realized
, Oh, it must stand for Metropolitan Life, here is Metropolitan Life,
and the letters appeared over the building, over the cross. And something didn't seem right. The water was flooding higher and higher. Hunter thought if he could just get to the cross, he could walk on the water, hahaha, like Jesus. And he looked at White Mike and thought
, Okay,
and the two of them rose up and started walking on the water. But then Hunter looked behind him, and he saw that Park Avenue was buried in a slate-green ocean, and the sky above was sending down forks of lightning, and the water was rolling back and forth and threatening to knock down the buildings. And there was smoke rising from the water where the burning trees had been extinguished.

White Mike was worried now. He hoped Hunter wasn't having a bad trip, whatever, exactly, that was. But his friend kept looking over his shoulder like something terrible was coming after him.

Hunter saw what was happening. He and White Mike were sinking, because all the water was rolling back toward Ninety-sixth Street, collecting there at the top of the hill. And Hunter was on the ground walking again, and he was below the cross at the MetLife Building. And as he looked, he saw a wave rise up and fly toward him, towering even above the buildings, rising out of the canyon. And the wave was so dark it was black, and it blocked out the moon, and it was bearing down on him and White Mike. And the image was suddenly there in his mind, forever, of this wave crashing down Park Avenue, and the trees on fire hundreds of feet below the crest, and the flames reflected off the inside of the face, and the water then looked dull orange and green, and the moon suddenly shot through with its white light.

White Mike could tell that Hunter was doing badly. He turned him around so they were facing uptown, and he looked to hail a cab. They stood waiting.

Hunter stood there as the wave came close and grew taller and the sound was a roar, louder than the thunder, and it filled his ears and he started yelling to try and drown it out as a cab pulled up next to them.

“Easy, Hunter,” White Mike was saying, because Hunter had started yelling in the cab, and the cabbie had gotten nervous and was making as if to pull over. White Mike threw a twenty through the partition and told the guy to keep driving.