Want Not (52 page)

A thousand mental miles down the bar, Micah flashed back to a family dinner she and Leah attended in India, and the way she’d felt when the hosts kept dipping into Hindi: the smile she’d manufactured in response to the incomprehensible words swirling ’round the table, the discomfort of her exclusion. She felt the same discomfort now, positioned outside this warm and spontaneous circle. Talmadge’s salt story was new to her—he’d mentioned the restaurant once, but only to cite the unconscionable food waste he’d witnessed—and watching him now, as he leaned knowingly into Joe’s stories about working the line at a restaurant whose name seemed familiar and impressive to him, she found herself marveling at Talmadge’s fluidity, the way he could slip in and out of the World with such smooth and mellow dexterity. She’d seen this before, of course, though not with such starkness; it had always struck her as more of a skill than a trait. But then how could it not be? He was an auto dealer’s son, with a genetic knack for small talk, armed from birth with social faculties Micah couldn’t imagine herself possessing. Her eyes were drawn back to the portrait on the wall, to the glowering gray face of the restaurant-to-be’s patron saint or demon. Her own inheritance had been a vision. A mutated certitude. An
idyll.

When the champagne bottle was empty they waved goodbye to their new friends, who invited them to come back when the restaurant opened for a “Manischewitz cocktail,” the bird-chirps of Donna’s laughter trailing them down the block. Talmadge’s hand found Micah’s, but she struggled to keep up with his rhythm and pace, which were lighter and faster than usual, big moonwalk steps that left her straggling behind. When she stopped to investigate some trash bags outside a Sixth Avenue deli, he tugged her forward, saying, “Not now.” She obliged, and let him lead her. On his face was the softest imprint of a smile, and she kept glancing at it as they walked in clasped silence, simultaneously troubled and reassured, as though the contentment she saw had once belonged to her, and her loving satisfaction at seeing him smile was offset by the emotional and physical hollow scoured from her insides. The sense of motionlessness returned, despite the city blocks clicking by, the preppy cobblestones of the far West Village giving way to the grittier mishmash of the East—a treadmill sensation, with the mileage of their walk as distorted and elongated as their own two-headed shadow in front of them was. She clasped his hand tighter, and he replied with a lingering squeeze. The moment was like that dessert Talmadge had described botching: creamy and sugary but crusted with charred salt. A sweetness contaminated.

They saw it together, from all the way down the block: their steel cellar doors splayed open to the street, with a police cruiser parked beside. The champagne fizz vanished instantly from Talmadge’s eyes. “Oh God,” he said, breaking into a rash and wild sprint. Micah stuck to the corner, watching. Arriving at the doors he peered down inside, and then looking back at Micah he threw up his hands in panicky indecision. The best course of action, she knew, was to stay put. Lola, who’d been through squat raids in Oakland and Vancouver, would’ve called their situation ideal: Wait out the cops, she’d advise, then gather your shit and vamoose. The best police contact is no police contact. But Talmadge was already going in. At the top of the door she saw him waving a desperate hand for her to follow. Micah found him at the bottom of the basement steps, buckling with fear. “What do we
do?
” he begged. She felt a small kernel of disgust pop inside her: That same debilitating timidity that’d kept Matty glued to them for all these months was now smeared across Talmadge’s face. She shook her head as she passed by him into the basement, hearing his high-pitched cursing as he fumbled for his penlight.

Two uniformed patrol officers were in the apartment. One was a pink-faced guy with a linebacker’s neck and tiny but predatory eyes; the other, who emerged from the kitchen just as Micah stepped through the apartment’s open doorway, was a short black woman with a dense, squat figure whose bewildered, congested expression was either a permanent facial condition or her reaction to the squat and its residents. “What’s going on here?” Micah asked her.

She didn’t answer, deferring to her partner. “That’s a good question,” he said, sly and challenging. “You the ones live here?”

Talmadge was in the apartment now, flush-faced, and mouth agape. “Yessir,” he said.

“You and who else?”

“We’ve had a friend, uh, staying with us—”

“Matthew Boone.”

“Yessir,” Talmadge said, his eyes ticking from the cop’s face to Micah’s.

“What’s he done?” Micah asked, the unspoken word
now
dangling at the question’s end.

“Done?” The cop was enjoying this, amusing himself further by imitating Micah’s drawl. “Who said he
done
anything?”

Talmadge asked, “Is he okay?”

“Manner of speaking. He’s in custody.” The cop was staring hard at Talmadge now, sizing him up. “He took a swing or two at a security guard down at the Best Buy on Broadway. Was doing some shopping on a fraudulent credit card.” His tiny eyes narrowed into blackened slits. “That sound about right to you?”

Talmadge shook his head, anxiety seeping into his face.

“Anyone else living here?”

“Nossir.”

“Just you and Boone and the lady.”

“Yessir.”

“Let’s pull out some IDs.”

The cops were divvying them up: Talmadge to the male cop, Micah to the female. Micah’s followed her into the bedroom so that Micah could fetch her passport. Noting it was expired, she asked if Micah had any other ID. When Micah said no the cop sighed and after an allergic survey of the bedroom wagged her head and sighed again, Micah stiffening against the scorn.

Back in the living room they found the male cop holding Talmadge’s satchel in his hands. “Whose bag is this?”

“Why?” Talmadge asked.

“That’s not an answer. Is it the lady’s? This your purse, miss?”

“My name is Micah,” she said.

“Okay, Myyyy-kah.” He repeated her name like that, with even more relish. “This your purse?”

“It’s mine,” Talmadge said.

“It’s your purse?”

“Yessir.”

“Mind if I look inside?”

Talmadge shook his head no, his eyes beginning to puff. The cop gave it a brief and theatrical look-see; he had clearly ransacked it earlier.

“That’s not a good bag to be claiming, is it?” he said.

“Nossir.”

“Why?” Micah broke in.

“Whose bank statements are those? Whose credit card statements?”

Talmadge shrugged, looking pulverized.

“But they’re not yours, right?”

“Nossir.”

“But that’s your weed in there, is that right?”

Talmadge shut his eyes, as if reeling from intestinal pain. “Yessir,” he whispered.

“Where’d the bank statements come from?”

“They’re just trash,” he answered, his voice quivering.

“Say again?”

“They’re just trash.”

“Trash. Right.” The cop straightened his back and nodded to himself, the button of his chin pulsing in and out of that thick neck. “You been working with Mr. Boone?”

“I’m not employed, sir,” Talmadge said, and the cop let out a harsh booming laugh, its peals bringing stuttered flinches to Talmadge’s face.

“Yeah, we can see that.” The cop did a fresh study of the living room, reading or rereading the line from Matthew 8:20 painted on the wall.
Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.
“You paint that?”

Talmadge said no.

“Who did?”

“Someone before us.”

“Someone before you.” The cop chewed on this for a moment. “How long you been squatting here?”

“Almost a year and half,” Micah said confidently. She glanced at Talmadge, who stood hunched in defeat. Matty on a shopping spree with a stolen credit card, financial garbage stuffed in Talmadge’s satchel: these revelations had yet to congeal in her head.

“A year and a half?” The cop scanned the room again, re-coloring it with this fact. “Damn.” He threw a look of repulsed disbelief to his partner. “Kept it pretty quiet, didn’t you?”

No one said anything.

“Could’ve burned the whole block down. All these candles. That heater.”

“We’re real careful,” Micah said.

“Bet you are,” the cop snorted, and to demonstrate the hazards pushed an unlit candle from the sidetable onto the floor. Then he pushed another one, this time spitefully. “You’re aware this is an illegal tenancy.”

“The building’s abandoned,” Micah said.

“That makes it yours?”

“It makes it nobody’s.”

“Which makes it
yours?
” A tickled expression brightened his face; he was going to enjoy recounting her logic later at the precinct house. “The world doesn’t work that way, hon. This little real-estate joyride—it ends today.”

Micah bristled; she didn’t know what was happening with Talmadge, though the pieces were beginning to bump together in her mind, but on this aspect she felt solid. “I know how the world works,” she said, with an assertive twang. “And I know that after thirty days of adverse possession y’all need a court-ordered eviction.”

“Adverse possession, y’all,” the cop aped. “Yeah, not so much.” He grunted. “All I need to do is make a quick call to the FD to get this place barricaded as a fire hazard.”

Micah felt herself falling back in retreat. She didn’t know if he was lying or not; Lola’s playbook hadn’t addressed this particular threat. “Is that what you’re doing?” she asked coolly.

“We’re doing a couple things here. That’s one of them, yeah.” He tossed his partner a heads-up. “The other is that we’re arresting you for unlawful possession of marijuana.”

“Oh come
on,
” Talmadge wailed, his eyes roving toward the female cop. “It’s not even an ounce.”

“We’ve got other things to talk about,” his cop said, directing Talmadge to place his hands against the wall. “Things like trash.”

“Ma’am?” Micah’s cop said to her.

Micah blinked at her obliviously.

“Need you to do the same,” she instructed.

Vacantly, Micah said, “You’re arresting
me?
”

“The weed’s mine, I told you,” Talmadge protested. “She’s straight edge.” He gasped as the handcuffs clamped his wrists. “She’s—she’s fucking pregnant.”

The cop’s hands went soft on Micah, in mid-frisk. “Is that true, ma’am?”

“No,” Micah said, and shot Talmadge an unfocused stare. “The baby’s dead. I miscarried.”

The room seemed to tilt with this statement, so that everyone—maybe even the cops, she wasn’t watching—rebalanced their feet on the floor, like when the subway takes off.

“What?” Talmadge moaned, but Micah could see the confused relief dribbling through him. Even handcuffed, a weight came off his shoulders, and on his face was a wreck of collided emotions only partially masked by a willed expression of dismay. Whatever sentence he’d been fearing had just been reduced, and just as she’d expected she felt a cold brute anger spasming her. “When?” she heard him ask. The chilled pinch of the handcuffs on her wrists dilated the anger, as by now the clues were gelling together, a blob of indictment taking unruly shape in her mind: Matty and Talmadge had been scrounging data from the trash. Just how it all worked she didn’t know, but Lola used to bitch about the guys (they were always guys) who did that in San Francisco. “Paper divers,” she called them, citing them as the reason she and Micah found so many dumpsters padlocked; they were ruining it for everyone, Lola complained. Garbage was the only pure crop that civilization produced, she and Lola used to say, because no one owned it, no one wanted it, no one fought over it, no one had ever launched a war to claim it. Land, air, water, people, animals: all these had been commodified, sacked with pricetags, and enslaved on that vast plantation known as civilization. Only garbage was free, in every sense of the word. Except—that wasn’t true, she understood now. Even that had been corrupted. And there was its corruptor, staring at her with stunned, sad-dog eyes, his lies scattered between them on the floor. This had all been an adventure for him; nothing more. His were borrowed principles, returnable at will. “This off-the-grid thing, it’s an action, not a life,” he’d argued, as if these were distinct, as if your actions were spendable, but your life was an inviolable fund. When the stakes were revealed, he’d bailed.

“Micah,” he whispered, but his voice bounced off her. She recognized the iciness overtaking her; she’d felt it with Leah, when Leah dropped the rupee note into the boy’s hand and somehow with it Micah’s devotion. The sudden immunity to love. Its swift and unsalvageable disposal. “Micah, look at me,” he begged.

“I’m taking Trashman here to the house,” the male cop told his partner, rotating Talmadge into the doorway. “You want to stay with her, Shenice—see if she needs medical, okay? Meyer’s on his way over.”

The apartment was darkening now, the fading afternoon light dissolving into the plaster and plywood. “Can I sit down?” Micah asked, and the cop said sure, her voice different now that her partner was gone: blunted, less intrusive, recognizably female. There’s a specific trick, Micah discovered, to sitting down while handcuffed, and when she swayed and stumbled the cop gripped her shoulders and lowered Micah into one of the metal chairs. She felt an almost violent desire for tears, to map the extent of her losses with sobs: the baby, Talmadge, the squat, the future she’d just seen smashed. Yet nothing came. Her chest felt constricted, cuffed. Even her mouth was dry.

“That your boyfriend?” the cop asked.

“Yeah,” she said, and not knowing how to amend or append resorted to adding, “Kinda.”

The cop looked as though she wanted to ask something else, something unofficial, woman-to-woman, but stopped herself. She shifted on her feet so that all her weapons and gear shuddered and clinked. “You need a hospital, ma’am?”

Micah shook her head no.

The cop studied her. Her radio squawked, but she ignored it. “Look,” she finally said, kneeling so that she could meet Micah’s eyes. “There’s a sergeant on his way to take you to the precinct. Is there anything you need from here? Because I don’t think getting back in here is gonna be an option for a while. Maybe ever.”