—Because if he was alive it couldn’t possibly be Mike Junior.

All of it like a slam in the chest. So immediate. At all of their coffee mornings, it had always been distant, belonging to another day, the talk, the memory, the recall, the stories, a distant land, but this was now and real, and the worst thing was that they didn’t know the walker’s fate, didn’t know if he had jumped or had fallen or had got down safely, or if he was still up there on his little stroll, or if he was there at all, if it was just a story, or a projection, indeed, or if she had made it all up for effect—they had no idea—maybe the man wanted to kill himself, or maybe the helicopter had a hook around him to catch him if he fell, or maybe there was a clip around the wire to catch him, or maybe maybe maybe there was another maybe, maybe.

Claire stands, a little shaky at the knees. Disoriented. The voices around her a blur now. She is aware of her feet on the deep carpet. The clock moving but not sounding anymore.

—I think I’ll put these in water now, she says.

—

h e woul d w r i t e letters to her about the wheel wars late at night. Four in the morning at his terminal under the white fluorescents, cutting code, when sometimes a message flashed up. Most of the intrusions were from members of his own squad, linked in a couple of desks away, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 100

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working on other programs, the tallies of war, and it was just a thing to pass the time, to hack another man’s code, to test his strength, find his vulnerability. Harmless, really, Joshua said.

Charlie and the Viet Cong didn’t have any computers. They weren’t going to sneak in past the cathode tubes and transistors. But the phone lines were linked up back to PARC and Washington, D.C., and some universities, so it was possible, every now and then, for a single slider—he called them sliders, she had no idea why—to come in from somewhere else and cause havoc, and once or twice they blindsided him. Maybe he was working on an overlap line, he said, or a code for the disappeared.

And he would be in the zone. He would feel, yes, like he was sliding down the banisters. It was about speed and raw power. The world was at ease and full of simplicity. He was a test pilot of a new frontier. Anything was possible. It could even have been jazz, one chord to the next. All fingertips. He could stretch his fingers and a new chord was suddenly there.

And then without warning it would begin disappearing in front of his eyes. I want a cookie! Or: Repeat after me, Bye- Bye Blackbird. Or: Watch me smile. He said it was like being Beethoven after scribbling the Ninth. He’d be out on a nice stroll in the countryside and suddenly all the sheet music was blowing away in the wind. He sat rooted to the chair and stared at his machine. The small blipping cursor ate away what he’d been doing. His code got munched. No way to stop it. All that dread rose in his throat. He watched it as it climbed over the hills and disappeared into the sunset.

Come back, come back, come back, I haven’t heard you yet.

How strange to think that there was someone else at the other end of the wires. It was like a burglar breaking into his house and trying on his slippers. Worse than that. Someone getting into my skin, Mama, taking over my memory. Crawling right inside him, up his spinal cord, inside his head, deep into the cranium, walking over his synapses, into his brain cells. She could imagine him leaning forward, his mouth almost to the screen, static on his lips. Who are you? He could feel the intruders beneath his fingertips. Thumbs drumming on his spine. Forefingers at his neck. He knew they were American, the intruders, but he saw them as Vietnamese—he had to—gave them a brown slant to their eyes. It was him and his machine against the other machine. Right, okay, now, well done, you got me, but now I’m going to crush you. And then he would step right into the fray.

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And she would go to the fridge and read his letters and sometimes she would open the freezer section and allow it all to cool him down. It’s all right, honey, you’ll get it back.

And he did. Joshua always got it back. He would phone her at odd hours, when he was elated, when he had won one of the wheel wars.

Long, looping calls that had an echo to them. Didn’t cost him a cent, he said. The squad had a switchboard with multiline capability. He said he had tapped into the lines, routed them down through the army recuiting number just for fun. It was just a system, he said, and it was there to be exploited. I’m okay, Mama, it’s not so bad, they treat us fine, tell Dad they even have kosher here. She listened intently to the voice. When the elation wore off, he sounded tired, distant even, a new language creeping in.

Look, I’m cool, Mama, don’t freak out. Since when did he say freak? He had always been careful with language. Wrapped it up in a tight Park Avenue crispness. Nothing loose or nasal about it at all. But now the language was coarser and his accent had stretched. I’m gonna go with the flow but it seems I’m driving another man’s hearse, Mama.

Was he taking care of himself? Did he have enough food? Did he keep his clothes clean? Was he losing weight? Everything reminded her. She even once put an extra plate out on the dinner table just for Joshua.

Solomon said nothing about it. That and her fridge, her little idiosyn-crasies.

She tried not to fret when his letters started to slacken. He wouldn’t call for a day or two. Or three in a row. She would sit staring at the phone, willing it to ring. When she stood, the floorboards gave out a little groan.

He was busy, he said. There had been a new development in electronic postings. There were more nodes on the electronic net. He said it was like a magic blackboard. The world was bigger and smaller both. Someone had hacked in to chew away parts of their program. It was a dogfight, a boxing match, a medieval joust. I’m in the front line, Mama, I’m in the trenches. Someday, he said, the machines would revolutionize the world.

He was helping other programmers. They logged on at the consoles and stayed on. There was a battle going on with the peace protesters, who were trying to break into their machines. But it was not machines that were evil, he said, but the minds of the top brass behind them. A machine could be no more evil than a violin, or a camera, or a pencil. What the intruders didn’t understand is that they were coming in at the wrong McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 102

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place. It was not the technology that they needed to attack, but the human mind, the way it failed, how it fell short.

She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get- together of the vain.

They wanted it simple—hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un- American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat. There were over forty thousand to account for now in his Death Hack, and the numbers kept growing. Sometimes he would print the names out. He could unfurl them up and down the stairs. He sometimes wished that someone would hack his program from outside, chew it up, spit it all back out, give life again to all those boys, the Smiths and the Sullivans and the Rodriguez brothers, these fathers and cousins and nephews, and then he’d have to do a program for Charlie, a whole new al-phabet of dying, Ngo, Ho, Phan, Nguyen— wouldn’t that be a chore?

—You okay, Claire?

A touch on her elbow. Gloria.

—Help?

—Excuse me?

—You want help with those?

—Oh, no. I mean, yes. Thanks.

Gloria. Gloria. Such a sweet round face. Dark eyes, moist, almost. A lived- in face. A generosity to it. But a little perturbed. Looking at me.

Looking at her. Caught in the act. Daydreaming. Help? She almost thought for a second that Gloria wanted to be the help. Presumptuous.

Two seventy- five an hour, Gloria. Clean the dishes. Mop the floor. Weep for our boys. A chore indeed.

She reaches high into the top cupboard and pulls out the Waterford glass. Intricate cut. Distant men do that. There are some that aren’t sav-ages. Yes, that’ll do nicely. She hands it to Gloria, who smiles, fills it.

—You know what you should do, Claire?

—What?

—Put sugar in the bottom. It keeps the flowers longer.

She has never heard that before. But it makes sense. Sugar. To keep them alive. Fill up our boys with sugar. Charlie and His Chocolate Factory. And who was it called the Vietnamese Charlie anyway? Where did it McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 103

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come from? Some radiospeak, probably. Charlie Delta Epsilon. Incoming, incoming, incoming.

—Even better if you clip the bottom of them first, says Gloria.

Gloria takes the flowers out and spreads them on the dish rack, takes a small knife from the kitchen counter and lops off a tiny segment of each, sweeps the stems into the palm of her hand, twelve little green things.

—Amazing, really, isn’t it?

—What’s that?

—The man in the air.

Claire leans against the counter. Takes a deep breath. Her mind whirling. She is not sure, not sure at all. A nagging discontent about him too. Something about his appearance sitting heavy, bewildering.

—Amazing, she says. Yes. Amazing.

But what is it about the notion that she doesn’t like? Amazing, indeed, yes. And an attempt at beauty. The intersection of a man with the city, the abruptly reformed, the newly appropriated public space, the city as art.

Walk up there and make it new. Making it a different space. But something else in it still rankles. She wishes not to feel this way, but she can’t shake it, the thought of the man perched there, angel or devil. But what’s wrong with believing in an angel, or a devil, why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to feel that way, why wouldn’t every man in the air appear to be her son? Why shouldn’t Mike Junior appear on the wire? What is wrong with that? Why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to freeze it there, her boy returned?

Yet still a sourness.

—Anything else, Claire?

—No, no, we’re perfect.

— Right- y- o, t hen. A ll s et.

Gloria smiles and hoists the vase, goes to the louvered door, pushes it open with her generous bulk.

—I’ll be right out, says Claire.

The door swings back shut.

She arranges the last of the cups, saucers, spoons. Stacks them neatly.

What is it? The walking man? Something vulgar about the whole thing.

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doesn’t quite know what it is. To think this way, how petty. Downright selfish. She knows full well that she has the whole morning to do what they have done on other mornings—bring out the photos, show them the piano Joshua used to play, open the scrapbooks, take them all down to his room, show them his shelf of books, pick him out from the yearbook.

That’s what they have always done, in Gloria’s, Marcia’s, Jacqueline’s, even Janet’s, especially Janet’s, where they were shown a slide show and later they all cried over a broken- spined copy of Casey at the Bat.

Her hands wide on the kitchen counter. Fingers splayed. Pressing down.

Joshua. Is that what rankles her? That they haven’t yet said his name?

That he hasn’t yet figured into the morning’s chatter? That they’ve ignored him so far, but no, it’s not that, but what is it?

Enough. Enough. Lift the tray. Don’t blow it now. So nice. That smile from Gloria. The beautiful flowers.

Out.

Now.

Go.

She steps into the living room and stops, frozen. They are gone, all of them, gone. She almost drops the tray. The rattle of the spoons as they slide against the edge. Not a single one there, not even Gloria. How can it be? How did they disappear so suddenly? Like a bad childhood joke, as if they might spring out of the closets any moment, or pop up from behind the sofa, a row of carnival faces to throw water balloons at.

It is, for an instant, as if she has dreamed them into being. That they have come to her, unasked, and then they have stolen away.

She lays the tray down on the table. The teapot slides and a little bubble of tea spurts out. The handbags are there and a single cigarette still burns in the ashtray.

It is then that she hears the voices, and she chides herself. Of course.

How silly of me. The bang of the back door and then the upper roof door in the wind. She must have left it open, they must have felt the breeze.

Down along the corridor. The shapes beyond the upper doorway. She climbs the final few steps, joins them on the roof, all of them leaning out over the wall, looking south. Nothing to see, of course, just a haze and the cupola at the top of the New York General Building.

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—No sign of him?

She knows of course that there could not be, even on the clearest of days, but it is nice to have the women turn to her in unison and shake their heads, no.

—We can try the radio, she says, sliding in behind them. It might be on a news report.

—Good idea, says Jacqueline.

—Oh, no, says Janet. I’d rather not.

—Me neither, says Marcia.

—Probably won’t be on the news.

—Not yet, anyway.

—I don’t think so.

They remain a moment, looking south, as if they might still be able to conjure him up.

—Coffee, ladies? A little tea?

—Lord, says Gloria with a wink, I thought you’d never ask.

—A nibble of something, yes.

—Calm our nerves?

—Yes, yes.

—Okay, Marcia?

—Downstairs?

—Mercy, yes. It’s hotter than a July bride up here.

The women guide Marcia back down the inside stairs, through the maid’s door, into the living room once more, with Janet on one arm, Jacqueline on the other, Gloria behind.

In the armchair ashtray, the cigarette has burned down to the quick, like a man about to break and fall. Claire puts it out. She watches as the women scrunch up tight on the sofa, arms around one another. Enough chairs? How could she have made such a mistake? Should she bring out the beanbag chair from Joshua’s room? Put it on the floor so that her body can spread itself out in his old impression?

This walking man, she can’t shake him. The bubble of discontent in her mind. She is being ungenerous, she knows, but she just can’t get rid of it. What if he hits somebody down below? She has heard that at night there are whole colonies of birds that fly into the World Trade Center buildings, their glass reflection. The bash and fall. Will the walker thump with them?

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Snap to. Enough.

Pull your mind together. Pick up all the feathers. Guide them gently back into the air.

—The bagels are in the bag there, Claire. And there’s doughnuts too.

—Lovely. Thanks.

The small niceties.

—Dearest Lord, look at those!

—Oh, my word.

—I’m fat enough.

—Oh, stop. I only wish I had your figure.

—Take it and run, says Gloria. Bet it spills over!

—No, no, you have a lovely figure. Fabulous.

—Come on!

—I must say, truly.

And a hush around the room for the little white lie. A pullback from the food. They glance at one another. An unfolding of seconds. A siren outside the window. The static broken and thoughts taking shape in their minds, like water in a pitcher.

—So, says Janet, reaching for a bagel. Not to be morbid or anything . . .

—Janet!

— . . . I don’t want to be morbid . . .

—Janet McIniff . . . !

— . . . but you think he fell?

—Ohmigod! Who gave you the sledgehammer?

—Sledgehammer? I just heard the siren and I—

—It’s okay, says Marcia. I’m okay. Really. Don’t worry about me.

—My God! says Jacqueline.

—I’m just asking.

—Really, no, says Marcia. I’m kinda wondering the same myself.

—Oh my God, says Jacqueline, the words stretched out now as if on elastic. I can’t believe you just said that.

Claire wishes now to be removed and off somewhere distant, some beach, some riverbank, some deep swell of happiness, some Joshua place, some little hidden moment, a touch of Solomon’s hand.

Sitting here, absent from them. Letting them close the circle.

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Maybe, yes, it’s just pure selfishness. They did not notice the mezu -

zah on the door, the painting of Solomon, didn’t mention a single thing about the apartment, just launched right in and began. They even walked up to the rooftop without asking. Maybe that’s just the way they do it, or maybe they’re blinded by the paintings, the silverware, the carpets. Surely there were other well- heeled boys packed off to war. Not all of them had flat feet. Maybe she should meet other women, more of her own. But more of her own what? Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world’s oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons. She feels a pang, a return. Dear Mother, this is just to say that I have arrived safely, the first began. And then at the end he was writing, Mama, this place is a nothing place, take all the places and give me nothing instead. Oh. Oh. Read all the letters of the world, love letters or hate letters or joy letters, and stack them up against the single one hundred and thirty-seven that my son wrote to me, place them end to end, Whitman and Wilde and Wittgen-stein and whoever else, it doesn’t matter—there’s no comparison. All the things he used to say! All the things he could remember! All that he put his finger upon!

That’s what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

But no, not past, not him, not ever.

Forget the letters. Let our machines fight. You hear me? Let them go at it. Let them stare each other down the wires.

Leave the boys at home.

Leave my boy at home. Gloria’s too. And Marcia’s. Let him walk a tightrope if he wants. Let him become an angel. And Jacqueline’s. And Wilma’s. Not Wilma, no. There was never a Wilma. Janet. Probably a Wilma too. Maybe a thousand Wilmas all over the country.

Just give my boy back to me. That’s all I want. Give him back. Hand him over. Right now. Let him open the door and run past the mezuzah and let him clang down here at the piano. Repair all the pretty faces of the young. No cries, no shrieks, no bleats. Bring them back here now. Why shouldn’t all our sons be in the room all at once? Collapse all the bound-aries. Why shouldn’t they sit together? Berets on their knees. Their slight embarrassment. Their creased uniforms. You fought for our country, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 108

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why not celebrate on Park Avenue? Coffee or tea, boys? A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

All this talk of freedom. Nonsense, really. Freedom can’t be given, it must be received.

I will not take this jar of ashes.

Do you hear me?

This jar of ashes is not what my son is.

—What’s that now, Claire?

And it’s as if she is rising again from a daydream. She has been watching them, their moving mouths, their mobile faces, but not hearing anything they’ve been saying, some sort of argument about the walking man, about whether the tightrope was attached or not, and she had drifted from it. Attached to what? His shoe? The helicopter? The sky? She folds and refolds her fingers into one another, hears the crack of them as they pull apart.

You need more calcium in your bones, the good doctor Tonnemann said. Calcium indeed. Drink more milk, your children won’t go missing.

—Are you okay, dear? says Gloria.

—Oh, I’m fine, she says, just a little daydreamy.

—I know the feeling.

—I get that way too sometimes, says Jacqueline.

—Me too, says Janet.

—First thing every morning, says Gloria, I start to dream. Can’t do it at night. I used to dream all the time. Now I can only dream in day-time.

—You should take something for it, says Janet.

Claire cannot recall what she has said—has she embarrassed them, said something silly, out of order? That comment from Janet, as if she should be on meds. Or was that aimed at Gloria? Here, take a hundred pills, it will cure your grief. No. She has never wanted that. She wants to break it like a fever. But what is it that she said? Something about the tightrope man? Did she say it aloud? That he was vulgar somehow?

Something about ashes? Or fashion? Or wires?

—What is it, Claire?

—I’m just thinking about that poor man, she says.

She wants to kick herself for saying it, for bringing him up again. Just when she felt that they could be getting away, that the morning could get McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 109

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back on track again, that she could tell them about Joshua and how he used to come home from school and eat tomato sandwiches, his favorite, or how he never squeezed the toothpaste properly, or how he always put two socks into one shoe, or a playground story, or a piano riff, anything, just to give the morning its balance, but, no, she has shunted it sideways again and brought it back around.

—What man? says Gloria.

—Oh, the man who came here, she says suddenly.

—Who’s that?

She picks a bagel from the sunflower bowl. Looks up at the women.

She pauses a moment, slices through the thick bread, pulls the rest of the bagel apart with her fingers.

—You mean the tightrope man was here?

—No, no.

—What man, Claire?

She reaches across and pours tea. The steam rises. She forgot to put out the slices of lemon. Another failure.

—The man who told me.

—What man?

—The man who told you what, Claire?

—You know. That man.

And then a sort of deep understanding. She sees it in their faces. Quieter than rain. Quieter than leaves.

—Uh huhn, says Gloria.

And then a loosening over the faces of the others.

—Mine was Thursday.

—Mike Junior’s was Monday.

—My Clarence was Monday as well. Jason was Saturday. And Brandon was a Tuesday.

—I got a lousy telegram. Thirteen minutes past six. July twelfth. For Pete.

For Pete. For Pete’s sake.

They all fall in line and it feels right, it’s what she wants to say; she holds the bagel at her mouth but she will not eat; she has brought them back on track, they are returning to old mornings, together, they will not move from this, this is what she wants, and yes, they are comfortable, and even Gloria reaches out now for one of the doughtnuts, glazed and McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 110

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white, and takes a small, polite nibble and nods at Claire, as if to say: Go ahead, tell us.

—We got the call from downstairs. Solomon and I. We were sitting having dinner. All the lights were off. He’s Jewish, you see . . .

Glad to get that one out of the way.

— . . . and he had candles everywhere. He’s not strict, but sometimes he likes little rituals. He calls me his little honeybee sometimes. It started from an argument when he called me a WASP. Can you believe that?

All of it coming out from her, like grateful air from her lungs. Smiles all around, befuddled, yet silence all the same.

—And I opened the door. It was a sergeant. He was very deferent. I mean, nice to me. I knew right away, just from the look on his face. Like one of those novelty masks. One of those cheap plastic ones. His face frozen inside it. Hard brown eyes and a broad mustache. I said, Come in.

And he took off his hat. One of those hairstyles, short, parted down the middle. A little shock of white along his scalp. He sat right there.

She nods over at Gloria and wishes she hadn’t said that, but there’s no taking it back.

Gloria wipes at the seat as if trying to get the stain of the man off. A little sliver of doughnut icing remains.

—Everything was so pure I thought I was standing in a painting.

—Yes, yes.

—He kept playing with his hat on his knee.

—Mine did too.

—Shh.

—And then he just said, Your son is passed, ma’am. And I was thinking, Passed? Passed where? What do you mean, Sergeant, he’s passed?

He didn’t tell me of any exam.

—Mercy.

—I was smiling at him. I couldn’t make my face do anything else.

—Well, I just flat- out wept, says Janet.

—Shh, says Jacqueline.

—I felt like there was rushing steam going up inside me, right up my spine. I could feel it hissing in my brain.

—Exactly.

—And then I just said, Yes. That’s all I said. Smiling still. The steam hissing and burning. I said, Yes, Sergeant. And thank you.

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—Mercy.

—He finished his tea.

All of them looking at their cups.

—And I brought him to the door. And that was it.

—Yes.

—And Solomon took him down in the elevator. And I’ve never told anyone that story. Afterward my face hurt, I smiled so much. Isn’t that terrible?

—No, no.

—Of course not.

—It feels like I’ve waited my whole life to tell that story.

—Oh, Claire.

—I just can’t believe that I smiled.

She knows that she has not told certain things about it, that the intercom had buzzed, that the doorman had stuttered, that the wait was a stunned one, that the sound of his knocking was like that against a coffin lid, that he took off his hat and said ma’am and then sir, and that they had said, Come in, come in, that the sergeant had never seen the like of the apartment before—it was obvious just from the way he looked at the furniture that he was nervous but thrilled too.

In another time he might have found it all glamorous, Park Avenue, fancy art, candles, rituals. She had watched him as he caught a mirror glance of himself, but he turned away from his own reflection and she might have even liked him then, the way he coughed into the hollow of his rounded hand, the gentleness of it. He held his hand at his mouth and he was like a magician about to pull out a sad scarf. He looked around, as if about to leave, as if there might be all sorts of exits, but she sat him down again. She went to the kitchen and brought a slice of fruitcake for him to eat. To ease the tension. He ate it with a little flick of guilt in his eyes. The little crumbs on the floor. She could hardly bring herself to vacuum them up afterward.

Solomon wanted to know what had happened. The sergeant said that he wasn’t at liberty, but Solomon pressed and said, None of us are at liberty, are we, really? I mean, when you think about it, Sergeant, none of us are free. And the hat went bouncing on the military knee again. Tell me, said Solomon, and there was a tremble in his voice then. Tell me or get out of my home.

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The sergeant coughed into a closed fist. A liar’s gesture. They were still collecting the details, the sergeant said, but Joshua had been at a café. Sitting inside. They had been warned, all the personnel, about the cafés. He was with a group of officers. They had been to a club the night before.

Must have been just blowing off steam. She couldn’t imagine that, but she didn’t say anything—her Joshua at a club? It was impossible, but she let it slide, yes, that was the word, slide. It was early morning, the sergeant said, Saigon time. Bright blue skies. Four grenades rolled in at their feet. He died a hero, the sergeant said. Solomon was the one who coughed at that.

You don’t die a fucking hero, man. She had never heard Solomon curse like that before, not to a stranger. The sergeant arranged his hat on his knee.

Like his leg might be the thing now that needed to tell the story. Glancing up at the prints above the couch. Miró, Miró, on the wall, who’s the dead-est of them all?

He pulled his breath in. His throat looked corrugated. I’m very sorry for your loss, he said again.

When he had gone, when the night was silent, they had stood there in the room, Solomon and Claire, looking at each other, and he had said they would not crack, which they hadn’t, which she wouldn’t, no, they wouldn’t blame each other, they wouldn’t grow bitter, they’d get through it, survive, they would not allow it to become a rift between them.

—And all the time I was just smiling, see.

—You poor thing.

—That’s awful.

—But it’s understandable, Claire, it really is.

—Do you think so?

—It’s okay. Really.

—I just smiled so much, she says.

—I smiled too, Claire.

—You did?

—That’s what you do, you keep back the tears, gospel.

And then she knows now what it is about the walking man. It strikes her deep and hard and shivery. It has nothing to do with angels or devils.

Nothing to do with art, or the reformed, or the intersection of a man with a vector, man beyond nature. None of that.

He was up there out of a sort of loneliness. What his mind was, what his body was: a sort of loneliness. With no thought at all for death.

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Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cue, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate, death by machete, death by motorbike, death by firing squad, death by gangrene, death by foot-sore, death by palsy, death by memory loss, death by claymore, death by scorpion, death by crack- up, death by Agent Orange, death by rent boy, death by harpoon, death by nightstick, death by immolation, death by crocodile, death by electrocution, death by mercury, death by strangula-tion, death by bowie knife, death by mescaline, death by mushroom, death by lysergic acid, death by jeep smash, death by grenade trap, death by boredom, death by heartache, death by sniper, death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game, death by numbers, death by bureaucracy, death by carelessness, death by delay, death by avoidance, death by appeasement, death by mathematics, death by carbon copy, death by eraser, death by filing error, death by penstroke, death by suppression, death by authority, death by isolation, death by incarceration, death by fratricide, death by suicide, death by genocide, death by Kennedy, death by LBJ, death by Nixon, death by Kissinger, death by Uncle Sam, death by Charlie, death by signature, death by silence, death by natural causes.

A stupid, endless menu of death.

But death by tightrope?

Death by performance?

That’s what it amounted to. So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all. His little Charlie Chaplin walk, coming in like a hack on her morning. How dare he do that with his own body?

Throwing his life in everyone’s face? Making her own son’s so cheap?

Yes, he has intruded on her coffee morning like a hack on her code. With his hijinks above the city. Coffee and cookies and a man out there walking in the sky, munching away what should have been.

—You know what? she says, leaning into the circle of ladies.

—What?

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She pauses a moment, wondering what she should say. A tremble running deep through her body.

—I like you all so much.

She is looking at Gloria when she says it, but she means it to them all, she genuinely means it. A little catch in her throat. She scans the row of faces. Gentleness and courtesy. All of them smiling at her. Come, ladies.

Come. Let us while away our morning now. Let it slide. Let us forget walking men. Let us leave them high in the air. Let us sip our coffee and be thankful. Simple as that. Let’s pull back the curtains and allow light through. Let this be the first of many more. No one else will intrude. We have our boys. They are brought together. Even here. On Park Avenue.

We hurt, and have one another for the healing.

She reaches for the teapot, her hands trembling. The odd sounds in the room, the lack of quiet, the rustle of bagel bags, and the peeling back of muffin wrappers.

She takes her cup and drains it. Dabs her knuckle at the side of her mouth.

Gloria’s flowers on the table, already opening. Janet picking a crumb off her plate. Jacqueline with her knee going up and down, in rhythm.

Marcia looking off into space. That’s my boy up there and he’s come to say hello.

Claire stands, not shaky at all, not one bit, not now.

—Come, she says, come. Let’s go see Joshua’s room.

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Being inside the car, when it clipped the back of the van, was like being in a body we didn’t know. The picture we refuse to see of ourselves. That is not me, that must be somebody else.

In any other circumstance we might have ended up at the side of the road, swapping license numbers, maybe haggling over a few dollars, even going immediately to a body shop to get the damage repaired, but it didn’t turn out that way. It was the gentlest tap. A small screech of the tires. We figured afterward that the driver must have had his foot on the brake, or his rear lights weren’t working, or maybe he had been riding the brake all along—in the sunlight we didn’t see the shine. The van was big and lazy. The rear fender was tied with wire and string. I recall seeing it like one of those old horses from my youth, a lumbering, impatient animal grown stubborn to being slapped on the rump. It was the back wheels that went first. The driver tried to correct. His elbow pulled in from the window. The van went sideways right, which is when he tried to correct again, but he pulled too hard and we felt the second jolt, like bumper cars at a fair, except we weren’t in a spin—our car was steady and straight.

Blaine had just lit a joint. It smoldered on the rim of an empty Coke can that sat between us. He had barely smoked any, one or two drags, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 116

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when the van spun out, brown and horsey: the peace decals on the rear glass, the dented side panels, the windows left slightly ajar. On and on and on it spun.

There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror.

Perhaps we figure it’s the last we’ll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over.

We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.

The driver had a handsome face and his hair was peppered toward gray. There were deep, dark bags under his eyes. He was unshaven and he wore a shirt ambitiously undone at the neck, the sort of man who might have been calm at most times, but the wheel was sliding through his hands now and his mouth open wide. He looked down at us from the height of the van as if he might be freezing our faces in memory too. His mouth stretched into a further O and his eyes widened. I wonder now how he saw me, my fringed dress, my curved beads, my hair cut flapper-style, my eyeliner royal blue, my eyes bleary with lack of sleep.

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max’s Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn’t get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another.

If only we had been so careful with ourselves.

Blaine was thirty- two. I was twenty- eight. We were two years married.

Our car, an antique 1927 Pontiac Landau, gold with silver paneling, was almost older than both of us put together. We had installed an eight- track that was hidden under the dashboard. We played twenties jazz. The music filtered out over the East River. There was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise.

The van spun farther. It was almost front- on. On the passenger side, all I could see was a pair of bare feet propped up on the dashboard. Un-tangling in slow motion. The bottoms of her feet were so white at the edges and so dark in their hollows that they could only have belonged to a black woman. She untucked at the ankles. The spin was slow enough. I could just see the top of her frame. She was calm. As if ready to accept.

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bounced at her neck. If I hadn’t seen her again, moments later, after she was thrown through the windshield, I might have thought she was naked, given the angle I was looking from. Younger than me, a beauty. Her eyes traveled across mine as if asking, What are you doing, you tan blond bitch in your billowy blouse and your fancy Cotton Club car?

She was gone just as quickly. The van went into a wider spin and our car kept on going straight. We passed them. The road opened like a split peach. I recall hearing the first crunch behind us, another car hitting the van, then the clatter of a grille that fell to the ground, and later on, when we went back over it all in our minds, Blaine and I, we reheard the impact of the newspaper truck as it sent them into the guardrail, a big boxy truck with the driver’s door open and the radio blaring. It hit with brute force.

There never would have been a way out for them.

Blaine looked over his shoulder and then floored it for an instant until I shouted at him to stop, please stop, please. Nothing more uncluttered than these moments. Our lives in perfect clarity. You must get out. Take responsibility. Walk back to the crash. Give the girl mouth- to- mouth.

Hold her bleeding head. Whisper in her ear. Warm the whites of her feet.

Run to a phone. Save the crushed man.

Blaine pulled over to the side of the FDR and we stepped out. The caw of gulls from the river, breasting the wind. The dapple of light on the water. The surging currents, their spinning motions. Blaine shaded his eyes in the sunlight. He looked like an ancient explorer. A few cars had stopped in the middle of the road and the newspaper truck had come to a sideways halt, but it wasn’t one of those enormous wrecks that you sometimes hear about in rock songs, all blood and fracture and American highway; rather, it was calm with only small sprinklings of jeweled glass across the lanes, a few bundles of newspapers in a havoc on the ground, distant from the body of the young girl, who was expressing herself in a patch of blooming blood. The engine roared and steam poured out of the van. The driver’s foot must still have been on the pedal. It whined incessantly, at its highest pitch. Some doors were opening in the stalled cars behind and already some other drivers were leaning on their horns, the chorus of New York, impatient to get going again, the fuck- you shrill. We were alone, two hundred yards ahead of the clamor. The road was perfectly dry but with patches of puddled heat. Sunlight through the girdings. Gulls out over the water.

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I looked across at Blaine. He wore his worsted jacket and his bow tie.

He looked ridiculous and sad, his hair flopping down over his eyes, all of him frozen to the past.

—Tell me that didn’t happen, he said.

The moment he turned to check the front of the car I recall thinking that we’d never survive it, not so much the crash, or even the death of the young girl—she was so obviously dead, in a bloodied heap on the road—

or the man who was slapped against the steering wheel, almost certainly ruined, his chest jammed up against the dashboard, but the fact that Blaine went around to check on the damage that was done to our car, the smashed headlight, the crumpled fender, like our years together, something broken, while behind us we could hear the sirens already on their way, and he let out a little groan of despair, and I knew it was for the car, and our unsold canvases, and what would happen to us shortly, and I said to him: Come on, let’s go, quick, get in, Blaine, quick, get a move on.

—

in ’ 7 3 bl aine a nd I had swapped our lives in the Village for another life altogether, and we went to live in a cabin in upstate New York. We had been almost a year off the drugs, even a few months off the booze, until the night before the accident. Just a one- night blowout. We’d slept in that morning, in the Chelsea Hotel, and we were returning to the old Grandma notion of sitting on the porch swing and watching the poison disappear from our bodies.

On the way home, silence was all we had. We ducked off the FDR, drove north, over the Willis Avenue Bridge, into the Bronx, off the highway, along the two- lane road, by the lake, down the dirt track toward home. The cabin was an hour and a half from New York City. It was set back in a grove of trees on the edge of a second, smaller lake. A pond, really. Lily pads and river plants. The cabin had been built fifty years before, in the 1920s, out of red cedar. No electricity. Water from a spring well. A woodstove, a rickety outhouse, a gravity- fed shower, a hut we used for a garage. Raspberry bushes grew up and around the back windows. You could lift the sashes to birdsong. The wind made the reeds gossip.

It was the type of place where you could easily learn to forget that we had just seen a girl killed in a highway smash, perhaps a man too—we didn’t k now.

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Evening was falling when we pulled up. The sun touched the top of the trees. We saw a belted kingfisher bashing a fish upon the dock. It ate its prey and then we sat watching its wheeling flight away—something so beautiful about it. I stepped out and along the dock. Blaine took out the paintings from the backseat, propped them against the side of the hut, pulled open the huge wooden doors where we kept the Pontiac. He parked the car and locked the hut with a padlock and then swept the car tracks with a broom. Halfway through the sweeping, he looked up and gave me a wave that was also a half- shrug, and he set to sweeping again.

After a while, there was no sign that we had even left the cabin.

The night was cool. A chill had silenced the insects.

Blaine sat beside me on the dock, kicked off his shoes, dangled his feet out over the water, fished in the pockets of his pleated trousers. The burned- out shadows of his eyes. He still had a three- quarter- full bag of cocaine from the night before. Forty or fifty dollars’ worth. He opened it and shoved the long thin padlock key into the coke, scooped up some powder. He cupped his hands around the key and held it to my nostril. I shook my head no.

—Just a hit, he said. Take the edge off.

It was the first snort since the night before—what we used to call the cure, the healer, the turpentine, the thing that cleaned our brushes. It kicked hard and burned straight through to the back of my throat. Like wading into snow- shocked water. He dipped into the bag and took three long snorts for himself, reared his head back, shook himself side to side, let out a long sigh, put his arm around my shoulder. I could almost smell the crash on my clothes, like I’d just crumpled my fender, sent myself spinning, about to smash into the guardrail.

—Wasn’t our fault, babe, he said.

—She was so young.

—Not our fault, sweetie, you hear me?

—Did you see her on the ground?

—I’m telling you, said Blaine, the idiot hit his brakes. Did you see him? I mean, his brake lights weren’t even working. Nothing I could do.

I mean, shit, what was I supposed to do? He was driving like an idiot.

—Her feet were so white. The bottoms of them.

—Bad luck’s a trip I don’t go on, babe.

—Jesus, Blaine, there was blood everywhere.

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—You’ve gotta forget it.

—She was just lying there.

—You didn’t see a goddamn thing. You listening to me? We saw nothing.

—We’re driving a ’27 Pontiac. You think nobody saw us?

—Wasn’t our fault, he said again. Just forget it. What could we do? He hit his goddamn brakes. I’m telling you, he was driving that thing like it was a goddamn boat.

—D’you think he’s dead too? The driver? You think he’s dead?

—Take a hit, honey.

—What?

—You gotta forget it happened, nothing happened, not a goddamn thing.

He stuffed the small plastic bag into the inside of his jacket pocket and stuck his fingers under the shoulder of his vest. We had both been wearing old- fashioned clothes for the better part of a year. It was part of our back- to- the- twenties kick. It seemed so ridiculous now. Bit players in a bad theater. There’d been two other New York artists, Brett and Delaney, who had gone back to the forties, living the lifestyle and the clothes, and they had made a killing from it, became famous, had even hit the New York Times style pages.

We had gone further than Brett and Delaney, had moved out of the city, kept our prize car—our only concession—and had lived without electricity, read books from another era, finished our paintings in the style of the time, hid ourselves away, saw ourselves as reclusive, cutting-edge, academic. At our core, even we knew we weren’t being original. In Max’s the night before—pumped up on ourselves—we had been stopped by the bouncers, who didn’t recognize who we were. They wouldn’t let us into the back room. A waitress pulled a curtain tight. She took pleasure in her refusal. None of our old friends were around. We spun backward, went up to the bar, the canvases in our arms. Blaine bought a bag of coke from the bartender, the only one to compliment our work. He leaned across the counter and gazed at the canvases, ten seconds, at most. Wow, he said. Wow. That’ll be sixty bucks, man. Wow. If you want some Panama Red, man, I got that too. Some Cheeba Cheeba. Wow. Just say the word. Wow.

—Get rid of the coke, I said to Blaine. Just throw it in the water.

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—Later, babe.

—Throw it away, please.

—Later, sweetie, okay? I’m chomping now. I mean, that guy, come on! He couldn’t drive. I mean what type of fucking idiot hits the brakes in the middle of the FDR? And you see her? She wasn’t even wearing any clothes. I mean, maybe she was blowing him or something. I bet that’s it.

She was sucking him off.

—She was in a pool of blood, Blaine.

—Not my fault.

—She was all smashed up. And that guy. He was just lying there against the steering wheel.

—You were the one told me to leave the scene. You’re the one said, Let’s go. Don’t forget it, you’re the one, you made the decision!

I slapped him once across the face, surprised at how hard it stung my hand. I rose from the dock. The wooden boards creaked. The dock was old and useless, jutting out into the pond like a taunt. I walked over the hard mud, toward the cabin. Up on the porch, I pushed open the door, stood in the middle of the room. It smelled so musty inside. Like months of bad cooking.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

We had been happy, Blaine and me, in the cabin over the past year. We had chased the drugs from our bodies. Rose each morning clear- headed.

Worked and painted. Carved out a life in the quiet. That was gone now. It was just an accident, I told myself. We had done the right thing. Sure, we’d left the scene, but maybe they would have searched us, discovered the coke, the weed, maybe they would have set Blaine up, or found out my family name, put it all over the newspapers.

I looked out the window. A thin stream of moonlight skidded on the water. The stars above were little pinpoints of light. The longer I looked the more they seemed like claw marks. Blaine was still on the dock, but stretched out lengthwise, almost a seal shape, cold and black, as if ready to slip away off the dock.

I made my way through the dark to the kerosene lamp. Matches on the table. I flicked the lamp alive. Turned the mirror around. I didn’t want to see my face. The cocaine was still pumping through me. I turned the lamp higher and felt its heat rise. A bead of sweat at my brow. I left the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 122

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dress in a puddled heap, stepped to the bed. I fell against the soft mattress, lay facedown, naked, under the sheets.

I could still see her. Most of all it was the bottoms of her feet, I had no idea why, I could see them there, against the dark of the tarmac. What is it that had made them so very white? An old song came back to me, my late grandfather singing about feet of clay. I buried my face further in the pillow.

The latch on the door clicked. I lay still and trembling—it seemed possible to do both at once. Blaine’s footsteps sounded across the floor. His breathing was shallow. I could hear his shoes being tossed near the stove.

He turned the kerosene lamp down. The wick whispered. The edges of the world got a little darker. The flame trembled and righted itself.

—Lara, he said. Sweetie.

—What is it?

—Look, I didn’t mean to shout. Really.

He came to the bed and bent down over me. I could feel his breath against my neck. It felt cool, like the other side of a pillow. I’ve got something for us, he said. He pulled the sheet down to my thighs. I could feel the cocaine being sprinkled on my back. It was what we had done together years ago. I did not move. His chin in the hollow at my low back.

The bristle where he hadn’t shaved. His arm draped against my ribcage and his mouth at the center of my spine. I felt the run of his face down along the back of my body and the very touch of his lips, aloof and root-less. He sprinkled the powder again, a rough line that he licked with his tongue.

He was rampant now and had pulled the sheet fully off me. We hadn’t made love in a few days, not even in the Chelsea Hotel. He turned me over and told me not to sweat, that it would make the cocaine clump.

—Sorry, he said again, sprinkling the coke low on my stomach. I shouldn’t have shouted like that.

I pulled him down by the hair. Beyond his shoulder the faint knots in the ceiling wood looked like keyholes.

Blaine whispered in my ear: Sorry, sorry, sorry.

—

w e h ad or i g ina l l y made our money in New York City, Blaine and me.

In the late sixties he had directed four black- and- white art films. His most McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 123

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famous film, Antioch, was a portrait of an old building being demolished on the waterfront. Beautiful, patient shots of cranes and juggernauts and swinging headache balls caught on

sixteen-

millimeter. It anticipated

much of the art that came behind it—light filtering in through smashed warehouse walls, window frames lying over puddles, new architectural spaces created by fracture. The film was bought by a well- known collector. Afterward Blaine published an essay on the onanism of moviemak-ers: films, he said, created a form of life to which life had to aspire, a desire for themselves only. The essay itself finished in midsentence. It was published in an obscure art journal, but it did get him noticed in the circles where he wanted to be seen. He was a dynamo of ambition. Another film, Calypso, had Blaine eating breakfast on the roof of the Clock Tower Building as the clock behind him slowly ticked. On each of the clock hands he had pasted photographs of Vietnam, the second hand holding a burning monk going around and around the face.

The films were all the rage for a while. The phone rang incessantly. Parties were thrown. Art dealers tried to doorstep us. Vogue profiled him. Their photographer had him dress in nothing but a long strategic scarf. We lapped up the praise, but if you stand in the same river for too long, even the banks will trickle past you. He got a Guggenheim but after a while most of the money was going toward our habits. Coke, speed, Valium, black beauties, sensimilla, ’ludes, Tuinals, Benzedrine: whatever we could find.

Blaine and I spent whole weeks in the city hardly sleeping. We moved among the loud- mouthed sinners of the Village. Hardcore parties, where we walked through the pulsing music and lost each other for an hour, two hours, three hours, on end. It didn’t bother us when we found the other in someone else’s arms: we laughed and went on. Sex parties. Swap parties.

Speed parties. At Studio 54, we inhaled poppers and gorged on champagne. This is happiness, we screamed at each other across the floor.

A fashion designer made me a purple dress with yellow buttons made from amphetamines. Blaine bit the buttons off one by one as we danced.

The more stoned he got, the more open my dress fell.

We were coming in at exits and going out at entrances. Nighttime wasn’t just a dark thing anymore; it had actually acquired the light of morning—it seemed nothing to think of night as having a sunrise in it, or a noontime alarm. We used to drive all the way up to Park Avenue just to laugh at the bleary- eyed doormen. We caught early movies in the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 124

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Times Square grind houses. Two- Trouser Sister. Panty Raid. Girls on Fire.

We greeted sunrises on the tar beaches of Manhattan’s rooftops. We picked our friends up from the psych ward at Bellevue and drove them straight to Trader Vic’s.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

There had been a tic in my left eye. I tried to ignore it but it felt like one of Blaine’s clock hands, moving time around my face. I had been lovely once, Lara Liveman, midwestern girl, blond child of privilege, my father the owner of an automobile empire, my mother a Norwegian model. I am not afraid to say it—I’d had enough beauty to get taxi drivers fighting. But I could feel the late nights draining me. My teeth were turning a tinge darker from too much Benzedrine. My eyes were dull. Sometimes it seemed that they were even taking my hair color. An odd sensation, the life disappearing through the follicles, a sort of tingling.

Instead of working on my own art, I went to the hairdresser, twice, three times a week. Twenty- five dollars a time. I tipped her another fifteen and walked down the avenue, crying. I would get back to painting again. I was sure of it. All I needed was another day. Another hour.

The less work we did, the more valuable we thought we had become.

I had been working toward abstract urban landscapes. A few collectors had been hovering at the edges. I just needed to find the stamina to finish. But instead of my studio, I stepped from the sunlight in Union Square into the comfortable dark of Max’s. All the bouncers knew me. A cocktail was placed on the table: a Manhattan first, washed down with a White Russian. I was airborne within minutes. I wandered around, chatted, flirted, laughed. Rock stars in the back room and artists in the front.

Men in the women’s bathroom. Women in the men’s, smoking, talking, kissing, fucking. Trays of hash brownies carried around. Men snorting lines of coke through the carcasses of pens. Time was in jeopardy when I was at Max’s. People wore their watches with the faces turned against their skin. By the time dinner rolled around it could have been the next day. Sometimes it was three days later when I finally got out. The light hit my eyes when I opened the door onto Park Avenue South and Seven-teenth Street. Occasionally Blaine was with me, more often he wasn’t, and there were times, quite honestly, I wasn’t sure.

The parties rolled on like rain. Down in the Village, the door of our dealer, Billy Lee, was always open. He was a tall, thin, handsome man. He McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 125

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had a set of dice that we used for sex games. There was a joke around that people came and went in Billy’s place, but mostly they came. His apartment was littered with stolen prescription pads, each script in triplicate with an individual BNDD number. He had stolen them from doctors’ offices on the Upper East Side; he used to go along the ground- floor offices on Park and Madison, kick the air conditioners in, and then crawl through the open window. We knew a doctor on the Lower East Side who would write the prescriptions. Billy was popping twenty pills a day. He said sometimes his heart felt as if it wrapped itself around his tongue. He had a thing for the waitresses at Max’s. The only one who eluded him was a blonde named Debbie. Sometimes I substituted for whichever waitress didn’t make it. Billy recited passages from Finnegans Wake in my ear. The father of fornicationists. He had learned twenty pages by heart. It sounded like a sort of jazz. Later I could hear his voice ringing in my ear.

In Blaine’s and my apartment, there were a few citations for loud music, once an arrest for possession, but it was a police raid that finally stalled us. A crashing through the door. The cops swarming around the place. Get to your feet. One of them bashed my ankle with a nightstick. I was too scared to scream. It was no ordinary raid. Billy was lifted from our couch, kicked to the floor, strip- searched in front of us. He was taken away in cuffs, part of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics sting. We got away with a warning: they were watching us, they said.

Blaine and I crawled around the city looking for a bump. Nobody we knew was selling. Max’s was closed for the night. The tough- eyed queers on Little West Twelfth Street wouldn’t let us into their clubs. There was a haze over Manhattan. We bought a bag on Houston but it turned out to be baking soda. We still stuffed it up our noses in case there was a small remnant of coke. We walked to the Bowery among the plainsong drunks and got smashed against a grocery store grate and robbed at knifepoint by three Filipino kids in lettered jackets.

We ended up in the doorway of an East Side pharmacy. Look what we’ve done to ourselves, said Blaine. Blood all over his shirt front. I couldn’t stop my eye from pulsing. I lay there, the wet of the ground seeping into my bones. Not even enough desire to weep.

An early- morning greaseball threw a quarter at our feet. E pluribus unum.

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return. There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop fail-ing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance.

We sold the loft we owned in SoHo and bought the log cabin so far upstate that it would be a long walk back to Max’s ever again.

What Blaine had wanted was a year or two, maybe more, in the sticks.

No distraction. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn’t a hippie idea. Both of us had always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from the hippies. We were the edge, the definers. We developed our idea to live in the twenties, a Scott and Zelda going clean. We kept our antique car, even got it refurbished, the seats re-upholstered, the dashboard buffed. I cut my hair flapper- style. We loaded up on provisions: eggs, flour, milk, sugar, salt, honey, oregano, chili, and racks of cured meat that we hung from a nail in the ceiling. We wiped away the cobwebs and filled the cupboards with rice, grain, jams, marshmal-lows—we believed we’d eventually be that clean. Blaine had decided it was time to go back to canvas, to paint in the style of Thomas Benton, or John Steuart Curry. He wanted that moment of purity, regionalism. He was sick of the colleagues he’d gone to Cornell with, the Smithsons and the Turleys and the Matta- Clarks. They had done as much as they possibly could, he said, there was no going further for them. Their spiral jetties and split houses and pilfered garbage cans were passé.

Me too—I’d decided that I wanted the pulse of the trees in my work, the journey of grass, some dirt. I thought I might be able to capture water in some new and startling way.

We had painted the new landscapes separately—the pond, the kingfisher, the silence, the moon perched on the saddle of the trees, the slashes of redwings among the leaves. We had kicked the drugs. We had made love. It all went so well, so very very well, until our trip back to Manhattan.

—

a blue daw n stretched in the room. Blaine lay like a stranded thing, all the way across the bed. Impossible to wake. Grinding his teeth in his sleep. A thinness to him, his cheekbones too pronounced, but he was not unhandsome: there were times he still reminded me of a polo player.

I left him in bed and went out onto the porch. It was just before sun-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 127

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rise and already the heat had burned the night rain off the grass. A light wind riffled across the surface of the lake. I could hear the faintest sounds of traffic from the highway a few miles away, a low gurgle.

A single jet stream cut across the sky, like a line of disappearing coke.

My head was pounding, my throat dry. It took a moment to realize that the previous two days had actually occurred: our trip to Manhattan, the humiliation at Max’s, the car crash, a night of sex. What had been a quiet life had gotten its noise again.

I looked over at the hut where Blaine had hidden the Pontiac. We had forgotten the paintings. Left them out in the rain. We hadn’t even covered them in plastic. They sat, ruined, leaning against the side of the hut, by some old wagon wheels. I bent down and flicked through. A whole year’s work. The water and paint had bled down into the grass. The frames would soon warp. Fabulous irony. All the wasted work. The cutting of canvas. The pulling of hair from brushes. The months and months spent painting.

You clip a van, you watch your life fade away.

I let Blaine be, didn’t tell him, spent the whole day avoiding him. I walked in the woods, around the lake, out onto the dirt roads. Gather all around the things that you love, I thought, and prepare to lose them. I sat, pulling the roots of vines off trees: it felt like the only valuable thing I could do. That night I went to bed while Blaine stared out over the water, licking the very last of the coke from the inside of the plastic baggie.

The following morning, with the paintings still out by the garage, I walked toward town. At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.

Halfway down the road a group of starlings flew up from a pile of dis-carded car batteries.

—

t h e t roph y diner was at the end of Main Street, in the shadow of the bell- tower church. A row of pickup trucks stood outside with empty gun racks in their windows. A few station wagons were parked on the church grounds. Weeds had cracked through the pavement at the door. The bell clanged. The locals on the swivel seats turned to check me out. More of them than usual. Baseball caps and cigarettes. They turned quickly away again, huddled and chatting. It didn’t bother me. They never had much time for me anyway.

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I smiled across at the waitress but she didn’t gesture back. I took one of the red booths under a painting of ducks in flight. Some sugar packets, straws, and napkins were scattered on the table. I wiped the formica top clean, made a structure out of toothpicks.

The men along the stools were loud and charged up but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was a momentary panic that they somehow knew of the accident, but it seemed beyond the bounds of logic.

Calm down. Sit. Eat breakfast. Watch the world slide by.

The waitress finally came and slid the menu across the table, placed a coffee in front of me without even asking. She usually wore her weari-ness like an autograph, but there was something jumped- up about her as she hurried back to the counter and settled in once more among the men.

There were small drip marks on the white coffee mug where it hadn’t been washed properly. I scrubbed it with a paper napkin. On the floor beneath me there was a newspaper, folded over and egg- stained. The New York Times. I hadn’t read a paper in almost a year. In the cabin we had a radio with a crank arm that we had to wind up if we wanted to listen to the outside world. I kicked the paper under the far side of the booth. The prospect of news was nothing in the face of the accident and the paintings we had lost as a result. A full year’s work gone. I wondered what might happen when Blaine found out. I could see him rising from bed, tousled, shirtless, scratching himself, the male crotch adjust, walking outside and looking over at the hut, shaking himself awake, running through the long grass, which would rebound behind him.

He didn’t have much of a temper—one of the things I still loved about him—but I could foresee the cabin strewn with bits and pieces of the smashed frames.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet- tasting time.

But there it was again, the girl’s spreading bloodstain.

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trilled through the room. I coughed loudly and smiled across at her again. She sighed as if to say that she’d be there, for God’s sake, don’t push me. She rounded the counter, but stopped once more, in the middle of the floor, laughed at some intimate joke.

One of the men had unfolded his paper. Nixon’s face on the front page rolled briefly before me. All slicked back and rehearsed and glut-tonous. I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come. My father had part- owned a car company in Detroit and the whole enormity of our family wealth had disappeared in the past few years. It wasn’t that I wanted the inheritance—I didn’t, not at all—but I could see my youth receding in front of me, those good moments when my father had carried me on his shoulders and tickled my underarms and even tucked me in bed, kissed my cheek, those days gone now, made increasingly distant by change.

—What’s going on?

My voice as casual as possible. The waitress with her pen poised over her writing pad.

—You didn’t hear? Nixon’s gone.

—Shot?

—Hell, no. Resigned.

—Today?

—No, tomorrow, honey. Next week. Christmas.

—’Scuse me?

She tapped her pen against the sharp of her chin.

—Whaddaya want?

I stammered an order for a western omelet and sipped from the water in the hard plastic glass.

A quickshot image across my mind. Before I met Blaine—before the drugs and the art and the Village—I had been in love with a boy from Dearborn. He’d volunteered for Vietnam, came home with the thousand-yard stare and a piece of bullet lodged perfectly in his spine. In his wheelchair he stunned me by campaigning for Nixon in ’68, going around the inner city, still giving his approval to all he couldn’t understand. We had broken up over the campaign. I thought I knew what Vietnam was—we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak. The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth. He had McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 130

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swallowed them all, even plastered his wheelchair with stickers. NIXON

LOVES JESUS. He went door to door, spreading rumors about Hubert Humphrey. He even bought me a little chain with a Republican elephant.

I had worn it to please him, to give him back his legs, but it was like the firelight had faded on the inside of his eyelids and his mind was punched away in a little drawer. I still wondered what might have happened if I had stayed with him and learned to praise ignorance. He had written to me that he had seen Blaine’s Clock Tower film and it had made him laugh so hard he had fallen out of his chair, he couldn’t get up, now he was crawling, was it possible to help him up? At the end of the letter he said, Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry.

Still, when I recalled him I would always see him waiting for me under the silver high school bleachers with a smile on his face and thirty- two perfect shining white teeth.

The mind makes its shotgun leaps: punch them away, yes, in a drawer.

I saw the girl from the crash again, her face appearing over his shoulder. It was not the whites of her feet this time. She was full and pretty. No eye shadow, no makeup, no pretense. She was smiling at me and asking me why I had driven away, did I not want to talk to her, why didn’t I stop, come, come, please, did I not want to see the piece of metal that had ripped open her spine, and how about the pavement she had caressed at fifty miles per hour?

—You all right? asked the waitress, sliding the plate of food across the table.

—Fine, yeah.

She peered into the full cup and said: Something wrong?

—Just not in the mood.

She looked at me like I was quite possibly alien. No coffee? Call the House of Un- American Activities.

Hell with you, I thought. Leave me be. Go back to your unwashed cups.

I sat silently and smiled at her. The omelet was wet and runny. I took a single bite and could feel the grease unsettling my stomach. I bent down and extended my foot under the table, pulled in yesterday’s newspaper, lifted it up. It was open to an article about a man who had walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers. He had, it seemed, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 131

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scoped out the building for six years and had finally not just walked, but danced, across, even lay down on the cable. He said that if he saw oranges he wanted to juggle them, if he saw skyscrapers he wanted to walk between them. I wondered what he might do if he walked into the diner and found the scattered pieces of me, lying around, too many of them to juggle.

I flicked through the rest of the pages. Some Cyprus, some water treatment, a murder in Brooklyn, but mostly Nixon and Ford and Water-gate. I didn’t know much about the scandal. It was not something Blaine and I had followed: establishment politics at its coldest. Another sort of napalm, descending at home. I was happy to see Nixon resign, but it would hardly usher in a revolution. Nothing much more would happen than Ford might have a hundred days and then he too would put in an order for more bombs. It seemed to me that nothing much good had happened since the day Sirhan Sirhan had pulled the malevolent trigger. The idyll was over. Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn’t much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.

In the paper there was no mention of a crash on the FDR Drive, not even a little paragraph buried below the fold.

But there she was, still looking at me. It wasn’t the driver who struck me at all—I didn’t know why—it was still her, only her. I was wading up through the shadows toward her and the car engine was still whining and she was haloed in bits of broken glass. How great are you, God? Save her.

Pick her up off the pavement and dust the glass from her hair. Wash the fake blood off the ground. Save her here and now, put her mangled body back together again.

I had a headache. My mind reeling. I could almost feel myself swaying in the booth. Maybe it was the drugs flushing out of my body. I picked up a piece of toast and just held it at my lips, but even the smell of the butter nauseated me.

Out the window I saw an antique car with whitewall tires pull up against the curb. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t a hallucination, something cinematic hauled from memory. The door opened and a shoe hit the ground. Blaine climbed out and shielded his eyes. It was almost the exact same gesture as on the highway two days before. He was wearing a lumber shirt and jeans. No old- fashioned clothes. He looked like he McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 132

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belonged upstate. He flicked the hair back from his eyes. As he crossed the road, the small- town traffic paused for him. Hands deep in his pockets, he strolled along the windows of the diner and threw me a smile.

There was a puzzling jaunt in his step, walking with his upper body cocked back a notch. He looked like an adman, all patently false. I could see him, suddenly, in a seersucker suit. He smiled again. Perhaps he had heard about Nixon. More likely he hadn’t yet seen the paintings, ruined beyond repair.

The bell sounded on the door and I saw him wave across to the waitress and nod to the men. He had a palette knife sticking out of his shirt pocket.

—You look pale, honey.

—Nixon resigned, I said.

He smiled broadly as he leaned over the table and kissed me.

—Big swinging Dickey. Guess what? I found the paintings.

I shuddered.

—They’re far out, he said.

—What?

—They got left out in the rain the other night.

—I saw that.

—Utterly changed.

—I’m sorry.

—You’re sorry?

—Yeah, I’m sorry, Blaine, I’m sorry.

—Whoa, whoa.

—Whoa what, Blaine?

—Don’t you see? he said. You give it a different ending. It becomes new. You can’t see that?

I turned my face up to his, looked him square in the eye, and said, No, I didn’t see. I couldn’t see anything, not a goddamn thing.

—That girl was killed, I said.

—Oh, Christ. Not that again.

—Again? It was the day before yesterday, Blaine.

—How many times am I gonna have to tell you? Not our fault.

Lighten up. And keep your fucking voice down, Lara, in here, for crying out loud.

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He reached across and took my hand, his eyes narrow and intent: Not our fault, not our fault, not our fault.

It wasn’t as if he’d been speeding, he said, or had had an intention to go rear- end some asshole who couldn’t drive. Things happen. Things collide.

He speared a piece of my omelet. He held the fork out and half pointed it at me. He lowered his eyes, ate the food, chewed it slowly.

—I’ve just discovered something and you’re not listening.

It was like he wanted to prod me with a dumb joke.

—A moment of satori, he said.

—Is it about her?

—You have to stop, Lara. You have to pull yourself together. Listen to me.

—About Nixon?

—No, it’s not about Nixon. Fuck Nixon. History will take care of Nixon. Listen to me, please. You’re acting crazy.

—There was a dead girl.

—Enough already. Lighten the fuck up.

—He might be dead too, the guy.

—Shut. The. Fuck. It was just a tap, that’s all, nothing else. His brake lights weren’t working.

Just then the waitress came over and Blaine released my hand. He ordered himself a Trophy special with eggs, extra bacon, and venison sausage. The waitress backed away and he smiled at her, watched her go, the sway of her.

—Look, he said, it’s about time. When you think about it. They’re about time.

—What’s about time?

—The paintings. They’re a comment on time.

—Oh, Jesus, Blaine.

There was a shine in his eyes unlike any I’d seen in quite a while. He sliced open some packets of sugar, dumped them in his coffee. Some extra grains spilled out on the table.

—Listen. We made our twenties paintings, right? And we lived in that time, right? There’s a mastery there, I mean, they were steady- keeled, the paintings, you said so yourself. And they referred back to that time, right?

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They maintained their formal manners. A stylistic armor about them, right? Even a monotony. They happened on purpose. We cultivated them.

But did you see what the weather did to them?

—I saw, yeah.

—Well, I went out there this morning and the damn things floored me. But then I started looking through them. And they were beautiful and ruined. Don’t you see?

—No.

—What happens if we make a series of paintings and we leave them out in the weather? We allow the present to work on the past. We could do something radical here. Do the formal paintings in the style of the past and have the present destroy them. You let the weather become the imaginative force. The real world works on your art. So you give it a new ending. And then you reinterpret it. It’s perfect, dig?

—The girl died, Blaine.

—Give it over.

—No, I won’t give it over.

He threw up his hands and then slammed them down on the table.

The solitary sugar grains jumped. Some men at the counter turned and flicked a look at us.

—Oh, fuck, he said. There’s no use talking to you.

His breakfast came and he ate it sullenly. He kept looking up at me, like I might suddenly change, become the beauty he had once married, but his eyes were blue and hateful. He ate the sausage with a sort of sav-agery, stabbed at it as if it angered him, this thing once alive. A little bit of egg stuck at the side of his mouth where he hadn’t shaved properly. He tried to talk of his new project, that a man could find meaning anywhere.

His voice buzzed like a trapped fly. His desire for surety, for meaning. He needed me as part of his patterns. I felt the urge to tell Blaine that I had in fact spent my whole life really loving the Nixon boy in the wheelchair, and that it had all been pabulum since then, and juvenile, and useless, and tiresome, all of our art, all our projects, all our failures, it was just pure cast- off, and none of it mattered, but instead I just sat there, saying nothing, listening to the faint hum of voices from the counter, and the rattle of the forks against the plates.

—We’re finished here, he said.

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Blaine snapped his fingers and the waitress came running. He left an extravagant tip and we stepped outside into the sunlight.

Blaine tipped a pair of giant sunglasses over his eyes, extended his stride, and walked toward the garage at the end of Main Street. I followed a couple of paces behind. He didn’t turn, didn’t wait.

—Hey, man, can you get a special order? he said to a pair of legs that were extended from underneath a car.

The mechanic wheeled himself out, stared upward, blinked.

—What can I get you, bud?

—A replacement headlight for a 1927 Pontiac. And a front fender.

—A what?

—Can you get them or not?

—This is America, chief.

—Get them, then.

—It takes time, man. And money.

—No problem, said Blaine. I got both.

The mechanic picked at his teeth, then grinned. He labored over toward a cluttered desk: files and pencil shavings and pinup calendar girls. Blaine’s hands were shaking, but he didn’t care; he was caught up on himself now and what he would do with his paintings once the car was fixed. As soon as the light and the fender could get repaired the whole matter would be forgotten and then he’d work. I had no idea how long this new obsession might last for him—an hour, another year, a lifetime?

—You coming? said Blaine as we stepped out of the garage.

—I’d rather walk.

—We should film this, he said. Y’know, how this new series gets painted and all. All from the very beginning. Make a document of it, don’t you think?

—

a row of s m o k er s

stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety- eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.

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I walked through the gauntlet. It was the fifth receiving room I had visited, and I had begun to think that perhaps both the driver and the young woman had been killed on impact and were taken immediately to a morgue.

A security guard pointed me toward an information booth. A window was cut into the wall of an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. A stout woman sat framed by it. From a distance it looked as if she sat in a television set. Her eyeglasses dangled at her neck. I sidled up to the window and whispered about a man and woman who might have been brought in from a crash on Wednesday afternoon.

—Oh, you’re a relative? she said, not even glancing up at me.

—Yes, I stammered. A cousin.

—You’re here for his things?

—His what?

She gave me a quick once- over.

—His things?

—Yes.

—You’ll have to sign for them.

Within fifteen minutes I found myself standing with a box of the late John A. Corrigan’s possessions. They consisted of a pair of black trousers that had been slit up the side with hospital scissors, a black shirt, a stained white undershirt, underwear, and socks in a plastic bag, a religious medal, a pair of dark sneakers with the soles worn through, his driver’s license, a ticket for parking illegally on John Street at 7:44 A.M. on Wednesday, August 7, a packet of rolling tobacco, some papers, a few dollars, and, oddly, a key chain with a picture of two young black children on it. There was also a baby- pink lighter, which seemed at odds with all the other things. I didn’t want the box. I had taken it out of embarrassment, out of a sense of duty to my lie, an obligation to save face, and perhaps even to save my hide. I had begun to think that perhaps leaving the scene of the crime was manslaughter, or at least some sort of felony, and now there was a second crime, hardly momentous, but it sickened me. I wanted to leave the box on the steps of the hospital and run away from myself. I had set all these events in motion and all they got for me was a handful of a dead man’s things. I was clearly out of my depth. Now it was time to go home, but I had taken on this man’s bloodstained baggage. I stared at the license. He looked younger than my freeze- frame memory McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 137

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had made him. A pair of oddly frightened eyes, looking way beyond the camera.

—And the girl?

—She was D.O.A., said the woman like it was a traffic signal.

She looked up at me and adjusted her glasses on her nose.

—Anything else?

—No thanks, I stammered.

The only things I could really jigsaw together was that John A. Corrigan—born January 15, 1943, five foot ten, 156 pounds, blue eyes—was probably the father of two young black children in the Bronx. Perhaps he had been married to the girl who was thrown through the windshield.

Maybe the girls in the key chain were his daughters, grown now. Or perhaps it was something clandestine, as Blaine had said, he could’ve been having an affair with the dead woman.

A photocopy of some medical information was folded at the bottom of the box: his sign- out chart. The scrawl was almost indecipherable. Car-diac tamponade. Clindamycin, 300 mg. I was for a moment out on the highway again. The fender touched the back of his van and I was spinning now in his big brown van. Walls, water, guardrails.

The scent of his shirt rose up as I walked out into the fresh air. I had the odd desire to distribute his tobacco to the smokers hanging around outside.

A crowd of Puerto Rican kids were hanging around in front of the Pontiac. They wore colored sneakers and wide flares and had cigarette packets shoved under their T- shirt sleeves. They could smell my nerves as I sidled through. A tall, thin boy reached over my shoulder and pulled out the plastic bag of Corrigan’s underwear, gave a fake shriek, dropped them to the ground. The others laughed a pack laugh. I bent down to pick up the bag but felt a brush of a hand against my breast.

I drew myself as tall as I possibly could and stared in the boy’s eyes.

—Don’t you dare.

I felt so much older than my twenty- eight years, as if I’d taken on decades in the last few days. He backed off two paces.

—Only looking.

—Well, don’t.

—Gimme a ride.

—Pontiac! shouted one boy. Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac!

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—Gimme one, lady.

More giggles.

Over his shoulder I could see a hospital security guard making his way toward us. He wore a kufi and loped as he came across, talking into a radio. The kids scattered and ran down the street, whooping.

—You all right, ma’am? said the security guard.

I was fumbling with the keys at the door of the car. I kept thinking the guard was going to walk around the front and see the smashed headlight and put two and two together, but he just guided me out into the traffic.

In the rearview mirror I saw him picking up the plastic bag of underwear I’d left on the pavement. He held them in the air a moment and then shrugged, threw them in the garbage can at the side of the road.

I turned the corner toward Second Avenue, weeping.

I had gone to the city ostensibly to buy a newfangled video camera for Blaine, to record the journey of his new paintings. But the only stores I knew were way down on Fourteenth Street, near my old neighborhood.

Who was it said that you can’t go home anymore? I found myself driving to the West Side of the city instead. Out to a little parking area in River-side Park, along by the water. The cardboard box sat in the passenger seat beside me. An unknown man’s life. I had never done anything like this before. My intent had entered the world and become combustible. It had been given to me far too easily, just a simple signature and a thank- you. I thought about dropping it all in the Hudson, but there are certain things we just cannot bring ourselves to do. I stared at his photograph again. It was not he who had led me here, but the girl. I still knew nothing about her. It made no sense. What was I going to do? Practice a new form of resurrection?

I got out of the car and fished in a nearby garbage can for a newspaper and scanned through it to see if I could find any death notices or an obituary. There was one, an editorial, for Nixon’s America, but none for a young black girl caught in a hit- and- run.

I screwed up my courage and drove to the Bronx, toward the address on the license. Entire blocks of abandoned lots. Cyclone fences topped with shredded plastic bags. Stunted catalpa trees bent by the wind. Auto-body shops. New and used. The smell of burning rubber and brick. On a half- wall someone had written: DANTE HAS ALREADY DISAPPEARED.

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It took ages to find the place. There were a couple of police cars out under the Major Deegan. Two of the cops had a box of doughnuts sitting on the dashboard between them, like a third- rate TV show. They stared at me, open- mouthed, when I pulled up the car alongside them. I had lost all sense of fear. If they wanted to arrest me for a hit- and- run, then go ahead.

—This is a rough neighborhood, ma’am, one of them said in a New York nasal. Car like that’s going to raise a few eyebrows.

—What can we do for you, ma’am? said the other.

—Maybe not call me ma’am?

—Feisty, huh?

—What you want, lady? Nothing but trouble here.

As if to confirm, a huge refrigerator truck slowed down as it came through the traffic lights, and the driver rolled down the window and eased over to the curb, looked out, then suddenly gunned it when he saw the police car.

—No nig- knock today, shouted the cop to the passing truck.

The short one blanched a little when he looked back at me, and he gave a thin smile that creased his eyelids. He ran his hands over a tube of fat that bulged out at his waist.

—No trade today, he said, almost apologetically.

—So, what can we do for you, miss? said the other.

—I’m looking to return something.

—Oh, yeah?

—I have these things here. In my car.

—Where’d you get that? What is it? Like the 1850s?

—It’s my husband’s.

Two thin smiles, but they looked happy enough that I’d broken their tedium. They stepped over to my car and rumbled around, running their hands along the wooden dash, marveling at the hand brake. I had often wondered if Blaine and I had gone on our twenties kick simply so we could keep our car. We had bought it as a wedding present for ourselves.

Every time I sat in it, it felt like a return to simpler times.

The second cop peered into the box of possessions. They were disgusting, but I was hardly in a position to say anything. I felt a sudden pang of guilt for the plastic bag of underwear that I had left behind at the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 140

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hospital, as if it somehow might be needed now, to complete the person who was not around. The cop picked up the parking ticket and then the license from the bottom of the box. The younger one nodded.

—Hey, that’s the Irish guy, the priest.

—Sure is.

—The one that was giving us shit. About the hookers. He drove that funky van.

—He’s up there on the fifth floor. I mean, his brother. Cleaning out his stuff.

—A priest? I said.

—A monk or some such. One of these worker guys. Liberation theo-whateveritis.

—Theologian, said the other.

—One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.

I felt a shudder of hatred, then told the cops that I was a hospital ad-ministrator and that the items needed to be returned—did they mind leaving them with the dead man’s brother?

—Not our job, miss.

—See the path there? Around the side? Follow that to the fourth brown building. In to the left. Take the elevator.

—Or the stairs.

—Be careful, but.

I wondered how many assholes it took to make a police department.

They had been made braver and louder by the war. They had a swagger to them. Ten thousand men at the water cannons. Shoot the niggers. Club the radicals. Love it or leave it. Believe nothing unless you hear it from us.

I walked toward the projects. A surge of dread. Hard to calm the heart when it leaps so high. As a child I saw horses trying to step into rivers to cool themselves off. You watch them move from the stand of buckeye trees, down the slope, through the mud, swishing off flies, getting deeper and deeper until they either swim for a moment, or turn back. I recognized it as a pattern of fear, that there was something shameful in it—

these high- rises were not a country that existed in my youth or art, or anywhere else. I had been a sheltered girl. Even when drug- addled I would never have gone into a place like this. I tried to persuade myself onward. I counted the cracks in the pavement. Cigarette butts. Unopened letters with footprints on them. Shards of broken glass. Someone whis-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 141

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tled but I didn’t look his way. Some pot fumes drifted from an open window. For a moment, it wasn’t like I was entering water at all: it was more like I was ferrying buckets of blood away from my own body, and I could feel them slap and spill as I moved.

The dry brown remnants of a floral wreath hung outside the main doors. In the hallway the mailboxes were dented and scorch- marked.

There was a reek of roach spray. The overhead lights were spray- painted black for some reason.

A large middle- aged lady in a floral- patterned dress waited at the elevator. She kicked aside a used needle with a deep sigh. It settled into the corner, a small bubble of blood at its tip. I returned her nod and smile.

Her white teeth. The bounce of imitation pearls at her neck.

—Nice weather, I said to her, though both of us knew exactly what sort of weather it was.

The elevator rose. Horses into rivers. Watch me drown.

I said good- bye to her on the fifth floor as she continued upward, the sound of the cables like the crack of old branches.

A few people were gathered outside the doorway, black women, mostly, in dark mourning clothes that looked as if they didn’t belong to them, as if they’d hired the clothes for the day. Their makeup was the thing that betrayed them, loud and gaudy and one with silver sparkles around her eyes, which looked so tired and worn- down. The cops had said something about hookers: it struck me that maybe the young girl had just been a prostitute. I felt a momentary sigh of gratitude, and then the awareness stopped me cold, the walls pulsed in on me. How cheap was I?

What I was doing was unpardonable and I knew it. I could feel my chest thumping in my blouse, but the women parted for me, and I went through their curtain of grief.

The door was open. Inside, a young woman was sweeping the floor clean. She had a face that looked like it came from a Spanish mosaic. Her eyes were darkened with streaks of mascara. A simple silver chain around her neck. She was clearly no hooker. I felt immediately under-dressed, like I was barging in on her silence. Beyond her, a replica of the man from the photo on the license, only heavier, jowlier, more sparsely stubbled. The sight of him knocked the oxygen out of me. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie and a jacket. His face was broad and slightly McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 142

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florid, his eyes puffy with grief. I stammered that I was from the hospital and that I was here to drop off the things that had belonged to a certain Mr. Corrigan.

—Ciaran Corrigan, he said, coming across and shaking my hand.

He seemed to me first the sort of man who would be quite happy doing crosswords in bed. He took the box and looked down, searched through it. He came to the keyring and gazed at it a moment, put it in his pocket.

—Thanks, he said. We forgot to pick these things up.

He had a touch of an accent to him, not very strong, but he carried his body like I had seen other Irishmen carry themselves, hunched into himself, yet still hyperaware. The Spanish woman took the shirt and brought it into the kitchen. She was standing by the sink and sniffing the cloth deeply.

The black bloodstains were still visible. She looked across at me, lowered her gaze to the floor. Her small chest heaved. She suddenly ran the tap and plunged the cloth into the water and began wringing it, as if John A. Corrigan might suddenly appear and want to wear it again. It was quite obvious that I wasn’t wanted or needed, but something held me there.

—We’ve got a funeral service in forty- five minutes, he said. If you’ll excuse me.

A toilet flushed in the apartment above.

—There was a young girl too, I said.

—Yes, it’s her funeral. Her mother’s getting out of jail. That’s what we heard. For an hour or two. My brother’s service is tomorrow. Cremation.

There’ve been some complications. Nothing to worry about.

—I see.

—If you’ll excuse me.

—Of course.

A short heavyset priest made his way into the apartment, announcing himself as a Father Marek. The Irishman shook his hand. He glanced at me as if to ask why I was still there. I went to the door, stopped, and turned around. It looked like the door locks had been jimmied a number of times.

The Spanish woman was still in the kitchen, where she suspended the wet shirt from a hanger above the sink. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember. She put her face in the shirt again.

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I turned and stammered.

—Would you mind if I went to the girl’s service?

He shrugged and looked at the priest, who scribbled a quick map on a scrap of paper, as if he was glad for something to do. He took me by the elbow and then down the corridor.

—Do you have any influence? the priest asked.

—Influence? I asked.

—Well, his brother has insisted on getting him cremated before he goes back to Ireland. Tomorrow. And I was wondering if you could talk him out of it.

—Why?

—It’s against our faith, he said.

Down the corridor, one of the women had begun wailing. She stopped, though, when the Irishman stepped out the door. He had jammed his tie high on his neck and his jacket was pulled tight across his shoulders. He was followed by the Spanish woman, who had a stately pride about her. The corridor was hushed. He pressed the button for the elevator and looked at me.

—Sorry, I said to the priest. I don’t have any influence.

I pulled away from him and hurried toward the elevator as it was closing. The Irishman put his hand in the gap and pulled the door open for me, and then we were gone. The Spanish woman gave me a guarded smile and said she was sorry she couldn’t go to the girl’s funeral, she had to go home and look after her own children, but she was glad that Ciaran had someone to go with.

I offered him a lift without thinking, but he said no, that he had been asked to travel in the funeral cortege, he didn’t know why.

He wrung his hands nervously as he stepped out into the sunlight.

—I didn’t even know the girl, he said.

—What was her name?

—I don’t know. Her mother’s Tillie.

He said it with a downward finality, but then he added: I think it’s Jazzlyn, or something.

—

i pa r k ed t h e c a r outside St. Raymond’s cemetery in Throgs Neck, far enough away that nobody could see it. A hum came from the expressway, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 144

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but the closer I got to the graveyard the more the smell of fresh- cut grass filled the air. A faint whiff of the Long Island Sound.

The trees were tall and the light fell in shafts among them. It was hard to believe that this was the Bronx, although I saw the graffiti scrawled on the side of a few mausoleums, and some of the headstones near the gate had been vandalized. There were a few funerals in progress, mostly in the new cemetery, but it was easy enough to tell which group was the girl’s.

They were carrying the coffin down the tree- lined road toward the old cemetery. The children were dressed in perfect white, but the women’s clothes looked like they had been cobbled together, the skirts too short, the heels too high, their cleavage covered with wraparound scarves. It was like they had gone to a strange garage sale: the bright expensive clothes hidden with bits and pieces of dark. The Irishman looked so pale among them, so very white.

A man in a gaudy suit, wearing a hat with a purple feather, followed at the back of the procession. He looked drugged- up and malevolent.

Under his suit jacket he wore a tight black turtleneck and a gold chain on his neck, a spoon hanging from it.

A boy who was no more than eight played a saxophone, beautifully, like some strange drummer boy from the Civil War. The music rang out in punctuated bursts over the graveyard.

I stayed in the background, near the road in a patch of overgrown grass, but as the service began, John A. Corrigan’s brother caught my eye and beckoned me forward. There were no more than twenty people gathered around the graveside but a few young women wailed deeply.

—Ciaran, he said again, extending his hand, as if I might have forgotten. He gave me a thin, embarrassed smile. We were the only white people there. I wanted to reach up and adjust his tie, fix his scattered hair, primp him.

A woman—she could only have been the dead girl’s mother—stood sobbing beside two men in suits. Another, younger woman stepped up to her. She took off a beautiful black shawl and draped it on the mother’s shoulders.

—Thanks, Ange.

The preacher—a thin, elegant black man—coughed and the crowd fell silent. He talked about the spirit being triumphant in the body’s fall, and how we must learn to recognize the absence of the body and praise McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 145

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the presence of what is left behind. Jazzlyn had a hard life, he said. Death could not justify or explain it. A grave does not equal what we have had in our lifetime. It was maybe not the time or the place, he said, but he was going to talk about justice anyway. Justice, he repeated. Only candor and truth win out in the end. The house of justice had been vandalized, he said. Young girls like Jazzlyn were forced to do horrific things. As they grew older the world had demanded terrible things of them. This was a vile world. It forced her into vile things. She had not asked for it. It had become vile for her, he said. She was under the yoke of tyranny. Slavery may be over and gone, he said, but it was still apparent. The only way to fight it was with charity, justice, and goodness. It was not a simple plea, he said, not at all. Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter—it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

—Justice, said Jazzlyn’s mother.

The preacher nodded, then looked up toward the high trees. Jazzlyn had been a child who grew up in Cleveland and New York City, he said, and she had seen those distant hills of goodness and she knew that one day she was going to get there. It was always going to be a difficult journey. She had seen too much evil on the way, he said. She had some friends and confidants, like John A. Corrigan, who had perished with her, but mostly the world had tried her and sentenced her and taken advantage of her kindness. But life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty, he said, and now she was on her way to a place where there were no governments to chain her or enslave her, no miscreants to demand the wrong thing, and none of her own people who were going to turn her flesh to profit. He stood tall then and said: Let it be said that she was not ashamed.

A wave of nods went around the crowd.

—Shame on those who wanted to shame her.

—Yes, came the reply.

—Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.

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—Yes.

—That bad life. That vile life. In front of you will stretch goodness.

You will follow the path and it will be good. Not easy, but good. Full of terror and difficulty maybe, but the windows will open to the sky and your heart will be purified and you will take wing.

I had a sudden, terrible vision of Jazzlyn flying through the windshield. I felt dizzy. The preacher’s lips moved, but for a moment I couldn’t hear. He was looking at a single place in the crowd, his vision fixed on the man in the purple hat behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. The man was biting his upper lip in anger and his body seemed to curl into itself, coiling and getting ready to strike. The hat shadowed him but he looked to have a glass eye.

—The snakes will perish with the snakes, said the preacher.

—Yessir, came a woman’s voice.

—They’ll be gone.

—Yes they will.

—Be they out of here.

The man in the purple hat didn’t move. Nobody moved.

—Go on! shouted Jazzlyn’s mother, contorting herself. She looked like she was strapped down but she was wriggling and squirming out of it. One of the men in suits touched her arm. Her shoulders were going from side to side and her voice was raw with rage.

—Get the fuck out of here!

I wondered for a horrific moment if she was shouting at me, but she was staring beyond me, at the man in the feathered hat. The chorus of shouts rose higher. The preacher held his hands out and asked for calm.

It was only then I realized that Jazzlyn’s mother had kept her arms behind her back the whole time, shackled with handcuffs. The two black men in suits beside her were city cops.

—Get the fuck out, Birdhouse, she said.

The man in the hat waited a moment, stretched upward, gave a smile that showed all his teeth. He touched the brim, tilted it, turned, and walked away. A small cheer went up from the mourners. They watched the pimp disappear down the road. He raised his hat one time, without turning around, waved it in the air, like a man who was not really saying good- bye.

—The snakes are gone, said the preacher. Let them stay gone.

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Ciaran steadied my arm. I was feeling cold and dirty: it was like putting on a fourth- hand blouse. I had no right to be there. I was tread-ing on their territory. But something in the service was pure and true: Behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.

The wailing had stopped and Jazzlyn’s mother said: Take these goddamn things off me.

Both cops stared straight ahead.

—I said take these goddamn things off me!

Finally, one of them stepped behind her and unlocked the handcuffs.

—Thank Jesus.

She shook her hands out and walked around the open grave, over toward Ciaran. Her scarf fell slightly and revealed the depth of her cleavage. Ciaran flushed red and embarrassed.

—I got a little story to tell, she said.

She cleared her throat and a swell went around the crowd.

—My Jazzlyn, she was ten. And she see’d a picture of a castle in a magazine somewheres. She went, clipped it out, and taped it on the wall above her bed. Like I say, nothing much to it, I never really thought that much about it. But when she met Corrigan . . .

She pointed over toward Ciaran, who looked to the ground.

— . . . and one day he was bringing around some coffee and she told him all about it, the castle—maybe she was bored, just wanted something to say, I don’t know. But you know Corrigan—that cat would listen to just about anything. He had an ear. And, of course, Corrie got a kick out of that. He said he knew castles just like that where he growed up.

And he said he’d bring her to a castle just like it one day. Promised her solid. Every day he’d come out and bring her coffee and he’d say to my little girl that he was getting that castle ready, just you wait. One day he’d tell her that he was getting the moat right. The next he said he was working on the chains that go to the gate bridge. Then he said he was working on the turrets. Then he’d say he was getting the banquet all squared away.

They were gonna have mead—that’s like wine—and lots of good food and there was gonna be harps playing and lots of dancing.

—Yes, said a woman in spangled makeup.

—Every day he had a new thing to say about that castle. That was their own little game, and Jazzlyn loved playing it, word.

She grabbed hold of Ciaran’s arm.

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—That’s all, she said. That’s all I have to say. That’s it. That’s fucking it, ’scuse me for saying it.

A chorus of amens went around the gathered crowd and then she turned to some of the other women and made a comment of some sorts, something strange and clipped about going to the bathroom in the castle.

A ripple of laughter went around a portion of the crowd and an odd thing occurred—she began quoting some poet whose name I didn’t catch, a line about open doors and a single beam of sunlight that struck right to the center of the floor. Her Bronx accent threw the poem around until it seemed to fall at her feet. She looked down sadly at it, its failure, but then she said that Corrigan was full of open doors, and he and Jazzlyn would have a heck of a time of it wherever they happened to be; every single door would be open, especially the one to that castle.

She leaned then against Ciaran’s shoulder and started to weep: I’ve been a bad mother, she said, I’ve been a terrible goddamn mother.

—No, no, you’re fine.

—There weren’t ever no goddamn castle.

—There’s a castle for sure, he said.

—I’m not an idiot, she said. You don’t have to treat me like a child.

—It’s okay.

—I let her shoot up.

—You don’t have to be so hard on yourself . . .

—She shot up in my arms.

She turned her face to the sky and then grasped the nearest lapel.

—Where’re my babies?

—She’s in heaven now, don’t you worry.

—My babies, she said. My baby’s babies.

—They’re just fine, Till, said a woman near the grave.

—They’re being looked after.

—They’ll come see you, T.

—You promise me? Who’s got them? Where are they?

—I swear it, Till. They’re okay.

—Promise me.

—God’s honest, said a woman.

—You better fucking promise, Angie.

—I promise. All right already, T. I promise.

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She leaned against Ciaran and then turned her face, looked him in the eye, and said: You remember what we done? You ’member me?

Ciaran looked like he was handling a stick of dynamite. He wasn’t sure whether to hold it and smother it, or throw it as far away from himself as he could. He flicked a quick look at me, then the preacher, but then he turned to her and put his arms around her and held her very tight. He said: I miss Corrie too. The other women came around and they took their turns with him. They were hugging him, it seemed, as if he were the embodiment of his brother. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows, but there was something good and proper about it—one after the other they came.

He reached into his pocket and took out the keyring with the pictures of the babies, handed it to Jazzlyn’s mother. She stared at it, smiled, then suddenly pulled away and slapped Ciaran’s face. He looked like he was grateful for it. One of the cops half grinned. Ciaran nodded and pursed his lips, then stepped backward toward me.

I had no idea what sort of complications I had stepped myself into.

The preacher coughed and asked for silence and said he had a few final words. He went through the formalities of prayer and the old bibli-cal Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but then he said that it was his firm belief that ashes could someday return to wood, that was the miracle not just of heaven, but the miracle of the actual world, that things could be reconstituted and the dead could come alive, most especially in our hearts, and that’s how he’d like to end things, and it was time to lay Jazzlyn to rest because that’s what he wanted her to do, rest.

When the service was ended the cops put the handcuffs back on Tillie’s wrists. She wailed just one single time. The cops walked her off.

She broke down into soundless sobs.

I accompanied Ciaran out of the cemetery. He took off his jacket and hung it over his shoulder, not nonchalantly, but to beat the heat. We went down the pathway toward the gates on Lafayette Avenue. Ciaran walked a quarter of a step in front of me. People can look different from hour to hour depending on the angle of daylight. He was older than me, in his mid- thirties or so, but he looked younger a moment, and I felt protective of him, the soft walk, the little bit of jowliness to him, the roll of tubbi-ness at his waist. He stopped and watched a squirrel climb over a large McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 150

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tombstone. It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to make sense.

The squirrel scampered up a tree trunk, the sound of its nails like water in a tub.

—Why was she in handcuffs?

—She got eight months or something. For a robbery charge on top of the prostitution.

—So they only let her out for the funeral?

—Yeah, from what I can gather.

There was nothing to say. The preacher had already said it. We walked out the gates and turned together in the same direction, toward the expressway, but he stopped and went to shake my hand.

—I’ll give you a lift home, I said.

—Home? he said, with a half- laugh. Can your car swim?

—Sorry?

—Nothing, he said, shaking his head.

We went down along Quincy, where I had parked the car. I suppose he knew it the minute he saw the Pontiac. It was parked with its front facing us. One wheel was up on the curb. The smashed headlight was apparent and the fender dented. He stopped a moment in the middle of the road, half nodded, as if it all made sense to him now. His face fell in upon itself, like a sandcastle in time lapse. I found myself shaking as I got into the driver’s side, leaned across to open up the passenger door.

—This is the car, isn’t it?

I sat a long time, running my fingers over the dashboard, dusty with pollen.

—It was an accident, I said.

—This is the car, he repeated.

—I didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t mean for it to happen.

—We? he said.

I sounded exactly like Blaine, I knew. All I was doing was holding my hand up against the guilt. Avoiding the failure, the drugs, the recklessness. I felt so foolish and inadequate. It was as if I had burned the whole house down and was searching through the rubble for bits of how it used to be, but found only the match that had sparked it all. I was clawing around frantically, looking for any justification. And yet there was still an-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 151

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other part of me that thought perhaps I was being honest, or as honest as I could get, having left the scene of the crime, having run away from the truth. Blaine had said that things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.

I kept cleaning the dashboard, rubbing the dust and pollen on the leg of my jeans. The mind always seeks another, simpler place, less weighted.

I wanted to rev the engine alive and drive into the nearest river. What could have been a simple touch of the brakes, or a minuscule swerve, had become unfathomable. I needed to be airborne. I wanted to be one of those animals that needed to fly in order to eat.

—You don’t work for the hospital at all, then?

—No.

—Were you driving it? The car?

—Was I what?

—Were you driving it or not?

—I guess I was.

It was the only lie I’ve ever told that has made any sense to me. There was the faint crackle of something between us: cars as bodies, crashing.

Ciaran sat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. A little sound came from him that was closer to a laugh than anything else. He rolled the window up and down, ran his fingers along the ledge, then tapped the glass with his knuckles, like he was figuring a means of escape.

—I’m going to say one thing, he said.

I felt the glass was being tapped all around me: soon it would splinter and crumble.

—One thing, that’s all.

—Please, I said.

—You should have stopped.

He thumped the dashboard with the heel of his hand. I wanted him to curse me, to damn me from a height, for trying to calm my own conscience, for lying, for letting me get away with it, for appearing at his brother’s apartment. A further part of me wanted him to actually turn and hit me, really hit me, draw blood, hurt me, ruin me.

—Right, he said. I’m gone.

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He had his hand on the handle. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped partly out, then closed it again, leaned back in the seat, exhausted.

—You should’ve fucking stopped. Why didn’t you?

Another car pulled into the gap in front of us to parallel- park, a big blue Oldsmobile with silver fins. We sat silently watching it trying to maneuver into the space between us and the car in front. It had just enough room. It angled in, then pulled out, then angled back in again. We watched it like it was the most important thing in the world. Not a movement between us. The driver leaned over his shoulder and cranked the wheel. Just before he put it in park he reversed once more and gently touched against the grille of my car. We heard a tinkle: the last of the glass left in the broken headlight. The driver jumped out, his arms held high in surrender, but I waved him away. He was an owl- faced creature, with spectacles, and the surprise of it made his face half comic. He hurried off down the road, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure.

—I don’t know, I said. I just don’t know. There’s no explanation. I was scared. I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough.

—Shit, he said.

He lit a cigarette, cracked the window slightly and blew smoke sideways out of his mouth, then looked away.

—Listen, he said finally. I need to get away from here. Just drop me off.

—Where?

—I don’t know. You want to go for a coffee somewhere? A drink?

Both of us were flummoxed by what was traveling between us. I had witnessed the death of his brother. Smashed that life shut. I didn’t say a word, just nodded and put the car in gear, squeezed it out of the gap, pulled out into the empty road. A quiet drink in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

Later that night, when I got home—if home was what I could call it anymore—I went swimming. The water was murky and full of odd plants. Strange leaves and tendrils. The stars looked like nail heads in the sky—pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall. Blaine had completed a couple of paintings and had set them up around the lake in vari-ous parts of the forest and around the water edge. A doubt had kicked in, as if he knew it was a stupid idea, but still wanted to experiment with it.

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There’s nothing so absurd that you can’t find at least one person to buy it.

I stayed in the water, hoping that he’d leave and go to sleep, but he sat on the dock on a blanket and when I rose from the water, he shrouded me with it. Arm around my shoulder, he walked me back to the cabin. The last thing I wanted was a kerosene lamp. I needed switches and electricity. Blaine tried to guide me to the bed but I simply said no, that I wasn’t interested.

—Just go to bed, I said to him.

I sat at the kitchen table and sketched. It had been a while since I had done anything with charcoal. Things took shape on the page. I recalled that, when we got married, Blaine had raised a glass in front of our guests and said with a grin: ’Til life do us part. It was his sort of joke. We were married, I thought then—we would watch each other’s last breath.

But it struck me, as I sketched, that all I wanted to do was to walk out into a clean elsewhere.

—

not h ing m uc h h ad happened, earlier, with Ciaran, or nothing much had seemed to happen anyway, at least not at first. It seemed ordinary enough, the rest of the day. We had simply driven away from the cemetery, through the Bronx, and over the Third Avenue bridge, avoiding the FDR.

The weather was warm and the sky bright blue. We kept the windows down. His hair wisped in the wind. In Harlem he asked me to slow down, amazed by the storefront churches.

—They look like shops, he said.

We sat outside and listened to a choir practice in the Baptist Church on 123rd Street. The voices were high and angelic, singing about being in the bright valleys of the Lord. Ciaran tapped his fingers absently on the dashboard. It looked like the music had entered him and was bouncing around. He said something about his brother and him not having a dancing bone in their bodies, but their mother had played the piano when they were young. There was one time when his brother had wheeled the piano out into the street along the seafront in Dublin, he couldn’t now for the life of him remember why. That, he said, was the funny thing about memory. It came along at the oddest moments. He hadn’t remembered it in a long time. They had wheeled the piano along the beach in the sun-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 154

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shine. It was the one time in his life that he remembered being mistaken for his brother. His mother had mixed up the names and called him John —Here, John, come here, love— and even though he was the older brother it was a moment when he saw himself as firmly rooted in childhood, and maybe he was still there, now, today, and forever, his dead brother nowhere to be found.

He cursed and kicked his foot against the lower panels of the car: Let’s get that drink.

At a Park Avenue overpass a kid swung on a harness and ropes, spray-painting the bridge. I thought of Blaine’s paintings. They were a sort of graffiti too, nothing more.

We drove down the Upper East Side, along Lexington Avenue, and found a dumpy little joint around about Sixty- fourth Street. A young bartender in a giant white apron hardly looked us over as we strolled in. We blinked against the beer light. No jukebox. Peanut shells all over the floor.

A few men with fewer teeth sat at the counter, listening to a baseball game on the radio. The mirrors were brown and freckled with age. The smell of stale fryer oil. A sign on the wall read: BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF

THE BEHOLDER.

We slid into a booth, against the red leather seats, and ordered two Bloody Marys. The back of my blouse was damp against the seat. A candle wavered between us, a small lambent glow. Flecks of dirt swam in the liquid wax. Ciaran tore his paper napkin into tiny pieces and told me all about his brother. He was going to bring him home the next day, after cremation, and sprinkle him in the water around Dublin Bay. To him, it didn’t seem nostalgic at all. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Bring him home. He’d walk along the waterfront and wait for the tide to come in, then scatter Corrigan in the wind. It wasn’t against his faith at all. Corrigan had never mentioned a funeral of any sort and Ciaran felt certain that he’d rather be a part of many things.

What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn’t think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go to. Even dead, he’d still do that.

His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.

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—What then?

—No idea. Maybe travel. Or stay in Dublin. Maybe come back here and make a go of it.

He didn’t like it all that much when he first came—all the rubbish and the rush—but it was growing on him, it wasn’t half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn’t matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

—You never know, in a place like this, he said. You just never know.

—You’ll be back, then? Sometime?

—Maybe. Corrigan never thought he’d stay here. Then he met someone. I think he was going to stay here forever.

—He was in love?

—Yeah.

—Why d’you call him Corrigan?

—Just happened that way.

—Never John?

—John was too ordinary for him.

He let the pieces of the napkin flutter to the floor and said something strange about words being good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t. He looked away. The neon in the window brightened as the light went down outside.

His hand brushed against mine. That old human flaw of desire.

I stayed another hour. Silence most of the time. Ordinary language escaped me. I stood up, a hollowness to my legs, gooseflesh along my bare arms.

—I wasn’t driving, I said.

Ciaran folded his body all the way across the table, kissed me.

—I figured that.

He pointed to the wedding ring on my finger.

—What’s he like?

He smiled when I didn’t reply, but it was a smile with all the world of sadness in it. He turned toward the bartender, waved at him, ordered two more Bloody Marys.

—I have to go.

—I’ll just drink them both myself, he said.

One for his brother, I thought.

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—You do that.

—I will, he said.

Outside, there were two tickets in the window of the Pontiac—a parking fine, and one for a smashed headlight. It was enough to almost knock me sideways. Before I drove home to the cabin, I went back to the window of the bar and shaded my eyes against the glass, looked in. Ciaran was at the counter, his arms folded and his chin on his wrist, talking to the bartender. He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.

There is, I think, a fear of love.

There is a fear of love.

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What he has seen often in the meadow: a nest of three red- tailed hawks, chicks, on the ledge of a tree branch, in a thick inter-twine of twigs. The chicks could tell when the mother was returning, even from far away. They began to squawk, a happiness in advance. Their beaks scissored open, and a moment later she winged down toward them, a pigeon in one foot, held by the talons. She hovered and alighted, one wing still stretched out, shielding half the nest from view. She tore off red hunks of flesh and dropped them into the open mouths of the chicks. All of it done with the sort of ease that there was no vocabulary for. The balance of talon and wing. The perfect drop of red flesh into their mouths.

It was moments like this that kept his training on track. Six years in so many different places. The meadow just one of them. The grass stretched for the better part of a half mile, though the line ran only 250

feet along the middle of the meadow, where there was the most wind.

The cable was guy- lined by a number of well- tightened cavallettis. Sometimes he loosened them so the cable would sway. It improved his balance.

He went to the middle of the wire, where it was most difficult. He would try hopping from one foot to the other. He carried a balancing pole that was too heavy, just to instruct his body in change. If a friend was visiting he would get him to thump the high wire with a two- by- four so that the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 158

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cable swung and he learned to sway side to side. He even got the friend to jump on the wire to see if he could knock him off.

His favorite moment was running along the wire without a balancing pole—it was the purest bodyflow he could get. What he understood, even when training, was this: he could not be at the top and bottom all at once.

There was no such thing as an attempt. He could catch himself with his hands, or by wrapping his feet around the wire, but that was a failure. He hunted endlessly for new exercises: the full turn, the tiptoe, the pretend fall, the cartwheel, bouncing a soccer ball on his head, the bound walk, with his ankles tied together. But they were exercises, not moves he would contemplate on a walk.

Once, during a thunderstorm, he rode the wire as if it were a surf-board. He loosened the guy cables so the wire was more reckless than ever. The waves the sway created were three feet high, brutal, erratic, side to side, up and down. Wind and rain all around him. The balancing pole touched against the tip of the grass, but never the ground. He laughed into the teeth of the wind.

He thought only later, as he went back to the cabin, that the pole in his hand had been a lightning rod: he could have been lit up with the storm—a steel cable, a balancing pole, a wide- open meadow.

The wood cabin had been deserted for several years. A single room, three windows, and a door. He had to unscrew the shutters to get light.

The wind came in wet. A rusted water pipe hung from the roof and once he forgot and knocked himself out on it. He watched the acrobatics of flies bouncing on cobwebs. He felt at ease, even with the rats scratching at the floorboards. He decided to climb out the windows instead of through the door: an odd habit—he didn’t know where it came from. He put the pole on his shoulder and walked out into the long grass toward the wire.

Sometimes there were Rocky Mountain elk that came to graze at the meadow edge. They raised their heads and peered at him and disappeared back into the treeline. He had wondered what they saw, and how they saw it. The sway of his body. The bar held out in the air. He was ecstatic when the elk began to stay. Clumps of two or three of them, keeping close to the treeline, but venturing forward a little more each day. He wondered if they would come and rub against the giant wooden poles that he had inserted into the ground, or if they would chew them and gnaw them away, leave the line to sag.

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He came back one winter, not to train, but to relax and to go over the plans. He stayed in the log cabin, on a ridge overlooking the meadow. He spread the plans and photographs of the towers out across the rough-hewn table at the small window that looked out and down at the emp -

tiness.

One afternoon he was astounded by a coyote stepping through the snow and jumping playfully just under his wire. At its lowest point in summer the wire had been fifteen feet in the air, but the snow was so deep now that the coyote could have leaped over.

After a while he went to put some wood in the stove and then suddenly the coyote was gone, like an apparition. He was sure he had dreamed it, except when he looked through binoculars there were still some paw marks in the snow. He went out in the cold to the path he had dug in the snow, wearing only boots, jeans, a lumber shirt, a scarf. He climbed the pegs in the pole, walked the wire without a balancing pole, and traveled out to meet the tracks. The whiteness thrilled him. It seemed to him that it was like stepping along the spine of a horse toward a cool lake. The snow reinstructed the light, bent it, colored it, bounced it. He was exuber-ant, almost stoned. I should jump inside and swim. Dive into it. He put one foot out and then hopped, arms stretched, palms flat. But in midflight he realized what he’d done. He didn’t even have time to curse. The snow was crisp and dense, and he had jumped feet- first off the wire, like a man into a pool. I should just have fallen backward, given myself a different form. He was chest- deep in it and could not get out. Trapped, he tried swishing back and forth. His legs felt wrong, neither heavy nor light. He was encased, a cell of snow. He broke free with his elbows and tried to grab the wire above him but he was too far down. The snow leaked along his ankle, down into his boots. His shirt had ridden up on his body. It was like landing in a cold wet skin. He could feel the crystals on his ribcage, his navel, his chest. It was his business to live, to fight for it—it would be, he thought, his whole life’s work just to get himself out of there. He grit-ted his teeth and tried inching himself upward. A long, tugging pain in his body. He sank back into his original form. The threat of gray sunset coming down. The far line of trees like sentries, watching.

He was the sort of man who could do chin- ups on one finger, but there was nothing to reach for—the wire was out of his grasp. There was the momentary thought of remaining there, frozen, until a thaw came, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 160

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and he’d descend with the thaw until he was fifteen feet under the wire again, rotting, the slowest sort of falling, until he reached the ground, perhaps even gnawed at by the same coyote he admired.

His hands were fully free and he warmed them by tightening and untightening. He removed the scarf from his neck, slowly, in measured motion—he knew his heart would be slowing in the cold—and he looped the wire with it and tugged. Little beads of snow shook from the scarf. He could feel the scarf threads stretch. He knew the wire, the soul of it: it would not betray him, but the scarf, he thought, was old and worn. It could stretch or rip. Kicking his feet out beneath him, through the snow, making room, looking for somewhere compact. Don’t fall backward.

Each time he rose, the scarf stretched. He clawed upward and pulled himself higher. It was possible now. The sun had dipped all the way behind the trees. He made circles with his feet to loosen them, pushed his body sideways through the snow, exploded upward, tore his right foot from the snow and swung his leg, touched the wire, found grace.

He pulled his body onto the cable, kneeled, then lay a moment, looked at the sky, felt the cable become his spinal cord.

Never again did he walk in the snow: he allowed that sort of beauty to remind him of what could happen. He hung the scarf on a hook on the door and the next night he saw the coyote again, sniffing aimlessly around where his imprint still lay.

He sometimes went into the local town, along the main street, to the bar where the ranchers gathered. Hard men, they looked at him as if he were small, ineffectual, effete. The truth was that he was stronger than any of them. Sometimes a ranch hand would challenge him to an arm wrestle or a fight but he had to keep his body in tune. A torn ligament would be disaster. A separated shoulder would set him back six months.

He placated them, showed them card tricks, juggled coasters. On leaving the bar he slapped their backs, pickpocketed their keys, moved their pickup trucks half a block, left the keys in the ignitions, walked home in the starlight, laughing.

Tacked inside his cabin door was a sign: nobody falls halfway.

He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen only once while training—once exactly, so he felt it couldn’t happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 161

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there had to be one small thread left hanging. But the fall had smashed several ribs and sometimes, when he took a deep breath, it was like a tiny reminder, a prod near his heart.

At times he practiced naked just to see how his body worked. He tuned himself to the wind. He listened not just for the gust, but for the anticipation of the gust. It was all down to whispers. Suggestion. He would use the very moisture in his eyes to test for it. Here it comes. After a while he learned to pluck every sound from the wind. Even the pace of insects instructed him. He loved those days when the wind rushed across the meadow with a fury and he would whistle into it. If the wind became too strong he would stop whistling and brace his whole self against it.

The wind came from so many different angles, sometimes all at once, carrying treesmell, bogwaft, elkspray.

There were times when he was so at ease that he could watch the elk, or trace the wisps of smoke from the forest fires, or watch the red- tail perning above the nest, but at his best his mind remained free of sight.

What he had to do was reimagine things, make an impression in his head, a tower at the far end of his vision, a cityline below him. He could freeze that image and then concentrate his body to the wire. He sometimes resented it, bringing the city to the meadow, but he had to meld the landscapes together in his imagination, the grass, the city, the sky. It was almost like he was walking upward through his mind on another wire.

There were other places where he practiced—a field in upstate New York, the empty lot of a waterfront warehouse, a patch of isolated sea marsh in eastern Long Island—but it was the meadow that was hardest to leave. He’d look over his shoulder and see that figure, neck- deep in snow, waving good- bye to himself.

He entered the noise of the city. The concrete and glass made a racket.

The thrup of the traffic. The pedestrians moving like water around him.

He felt like an ancient immigrant: he had stepped onto new shores. He would walk the perimeter of the city but seldom out of sight of the towers. It was the limit of what a man could do. Nobody else had even dreamed it. He could feel his body swelling with the audacity. Secretly, he scouted the towers. Past the guards. Up the stairwell. The south tower was still unfinished. Much of the building was still unoccupied, nursed in scaffold. He wondered who the others walking around were, what their purpose was. He walked out onto the unfinished roof, wearing a McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 162

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construction hat to avoid detection. He took a mold of the towers in his head. The vision of the double cavallettis on the roof. The y- shaped spread of the wires as they would eventually be. The reflections from the windows and how they would mirror him, at angles, from below. He put one foot out over the edge and dipped his shoe in the air, did a handstand at the very edge of the roof.

When he left the rooftop he felt he was waving to his old friend again: neck- deep, this time a quarter of a mile in the sky.

He was checking the perimeter of the south tower one dawn, marking out the schedules of delivery trucks, when he saw a woman in a green jumpsuit, bent down as if tying her shoelaces, over and over again, around the base of the towers. Little bursts of feathers came from the woman’s hands. She was putting the dead birds in little ziploc bags. White- throated sparrows mostly, some songbirds too. They migrated late at night, when the air currents were calmest. Dazzled by the building lights, they crashed into the glass, or flew endlessly around the towers until exhaustion got them, their natural navigational abilities stunned. She handed him a feather from a black- throated warbler, and when he left the city again he brought it to the meadow and tacked that too just inside the cabin wall.

Another reminder.

Everything had purpose, signal, meaning.

But in the end he knew that it all came down to the wire. Him and the cable. Two hundred and ten feet and the distance it bridged. The towers had been designed to sway a full three feet in a storm. A violent gust or even a sudden change in temperature would force the buildings to sway and the wire could tighten and bounce. It was one of the few things that came down to chance. If he was on it, he would have to ride out the bounce or else he’d go flying. A sway of the buildings could snap the wire in two. The frayed end of a cord could even chop a man’s head clean off in midflight. He needed to be meticulous to get it all right: the winch, the come- along, the spanners, the straightening, the aligning, the mathematics, the measuring of resistance. He wanted the wire at a tension of three tons. But the tighter a cable, the more grease that might ooze out of it.

Even a change in weather could make a touch of grease slip from the core.

He went over the plans with friends. They would have to sneak into the other tower, put the cavallettis in place, winch the wire tight, look out for security guards, keep him up to date on an intercom. The walk would be McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 163

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impossible otherwise. They spread out plans of the building and learned them by heart. The stairwells. The guard stations. They knew hiding places where they would never be found. It was like they were planning a bank raid. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d wander alone down to the tone-less streets near the World Trade Center: in the distance, lights on, the buildings seemed one. He’d stop at a street corner and bring himself up there, imagine himself into the sky, a figure darker than the darkness.

The night before the walk he stretched the cable out the full length of a city block. Drivers stared at him as he unfurled it. He needed to clean the wire. Meticulously he went along and scrubbed it with a rag soaked in gasoline, then rubbed it with emery. He had to make sure there were no stray strands that might poke his foot through the slippers. A single splinter—a meat hook—could be deadly. And there were spaces in each cable where the wires needed to be seated. There could be no surprises.

The cable had its own moods. The worst of all was an internal torque, where the cable turned inside itself, like a snake moving through a skin.

The cable was six strands thick with nineteen wires in each. Seven eighths of an inch in diameter. Braided to perfection. The strands had been wound around the core in a lay configuration, which gave his feet the most grip. He and his friends walked along the cable and pretended that they were high in the air.

On the night of the walk it took them ten hours to string the furtive cable. He was exhausted. He hadn’t brought enough water. He thought perhaps he mightn’t even be able to walk, so dehydrated that his body would crack on movement. But the simple sight of the cable tightened between the towers thrilled him. The call came across the intercom from the far tower. They were ready. He felt a bolt of pure energy move through him: he was new again. The silence seemed made for him to sway about in. The morning light climbed over the dockyards, the river, the gray waterfront, over the low squalor of the East Side, where it spread and dif-fused—doorway, awning, cornice piece, window ledge, brickwork, railing, roofline—until it took a lengthy leap and hit the hard space of downtown.

He whispered into the intercom and waved to the waiting figure on the south tower. Time to go.

One foot on the wire—his better foot, the balancing foot. First he slid his toes, then his sole, then his heel. The cable nested between his big and second toes for grip. His slippers were thin, the soles made of buf-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 164

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falo hide. He paused there a moment, pulled the line tighter by the strength of his eyes. He played out the aluminum pole along his hands.

The coolness rolled across his palm. The pole was fifty- five pounds, half the weight of a woman. She moved on his skin like water. He had wrapped rubber tubing around its center to keep it from slipping. With a curve of his left fingers he was able to tighten his right- hand calf muscle.

The little finger played out the shape of his shoulder. It was the thumb that held the bar in place. He tilted upward right and the body came slightly left. The roll in the hand was so tiny no naked eye could see it.

His mind shifted space to receive his old practiced self. No tiredness in his body anymore. He held the bar in muscular memory and in one flow went forward.

What happened then was that, for an instant, almost nothing happened. He wasn’t even there. Failure didn’t even cross his mind. It felt like a sort of floating. He could have been in the meadow. His body loosened and took on the shape of the wind. The play of the shoulder could instruct the ankle. His throat could soothe his heel and moisten the ligaments at his ankle. A touch of the tongue against the teeth could relax the thigh. His elbow could brother his knee. If he tightened his neck he could feel it correcting in his hip. At his center he never moved. He thought of his stomach as a bowl of water. If he got it wrong, the bowl would right itself. He felt for the curve of the cable with the arch and then sole of his foot. A second step and a third. He went out beyond the first guy lines, all of him in synch.

Within seconds he was pureness moving, and he could do anything he liked. He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past, and this gave him the offhand vaunt to his walk. He was carrying his life from one side to the other. On the lookout for the moment when he wasn’t even aware of his breath.

The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

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T W O

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T A G

Catch him here, in the crook of the carriages, with the morning already ovened up and muggy. Nine shots left on the roll. Nearly all the photos taken in darkness. Two of them, at least, the flash didn’t work. Four of them were from moving trains. Another one, taken up in the Concourse, was a pure dud, he was sure of it.

He surfs the thin metal platform as the train jags south out of Grand Central. At times he gets dizzy just anticipating the next corner. That speed. That wild noise in his ears. The truth is, it frightens him. The steel thrumming through him. It’s like he has the whole train in his sneakers.

Control and oblivion. Sometimes it feels like he’s the one driving. Too far left and the train might smash into the corner and there’ll be a million mangled bodies along the rail. Too far right and the cars will skid sideways and it’ll be good- bye, nice knowing you, see you in the headlines.

He’s been on the train since the Bronx, one hand on his camera, the other on the car door. Feet wide for balance. Eyes tight to the tunnel wall, looking for new tags.

He’s on his way to work downtown, but to hell with those combs, those scissors, those shave bottles—he’s hoping for the morning to open up with a tag. It’s the only thing that oils the hinges of his day. Everything else crawls, but the tags climb up into his eyeballs. PHASE 2. KIVU. SUPER

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KOOL 223. He loves the way the letters curl, the arcs, the swerves, the flames, their clouds.

He rides the local just to see who’s been there during the night, who came and signed, how deep they got into the dark. He doesn’t have much time for the aboveground anymore, the railway bridges, the platforms, the warehouse walls, even the garbage trucks. Chumpwork that. Any chulo can do a throw- up on a wall: it’s the underground tags he’s grown to love the most. The ones you find in darkness. Way in the sides of the tunnels. The surprise of them. The deeper, the better. Lit up by the moving lights of the train and caught for just an instant so that he’s never quite sure if he’s seen them or not. JOE 182, COCO 144, TOPCAT 126. Some are quick scrawls. Others go from gravel to roof, maybe two or three cans’

worth altogether, letters looping like they want to keep from ending, as if they’ve taken themselves a lungful of air. Others go five feet along the tunnel. The best of all is an eighteen- foot stretch under the Grand Concourse.

For a while they were tagging with just one color, mostly silver so it’d shine in the depths, but this summer they’ve gone up to two, three, four colors: red, blue, yellow, even black. That stumped him when he saw it first—putting a three- color tag where nobody would see it. Someone was high or brilliant or both. He walked around all day, just turning it over in his mind. The size of the flare. The depth. They were even using different- size nozzles on their cans: he could tell by the texture of the spray. He thought of the taggers scooting in and ignoring the third rail, the rats, the moles, the grime, the stink, the steel dust, the hatches, the steps, the signal lights, the wires, the pipes, the split tracks, the John 3:16’s, the litter, the grates, the puddles.

The sheer cojones of it was that they were doing it underneath the city. Like the whole of upstairs had already been painted and the only territory left was here. Like they were hitting a new frontier. This is my house. Read it and weep.

Used to be, he dug the bombings, riding in a swallowed- up train, where he was just another color himself, a paint spot in a hundred other paint spots. Slamming downtown, through the rat alleys. No way out.

He’d close his eyes and stand near the doors and roll his shoulders, think of the colors moving around him. Not just anyone could bomb a whole train. You had to be in the heart of things. Scale a yard fence, hop a track, McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 169

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hit a car, run off, send the steel out into the bright morning without a window to see through, the whole train tagged head to toe. He even tried a few times to hang out on the Concourse, where the ’Rican and Domini-can taggers were, but they had no time for him, none of them, told him he didn’t jive, called him names again, Simplón, Cabronazo, Pendejo.

Thing was, he had been a straight- A student all year long. He didn’t want to be, but that’s how it turned out—he was the only one who hadn’t cut classes. So they laughed him off. He slumped away. He even thought of going across to the blacks on the other side of the Concourse, but decided against it. He returned with his camera, the one he got from the barbershop, went to the ’Ricans, and said he’d be able to make them famous.

They laughed again and he got bitch- slapped by a twelve- year- old Skull.

But then in the middle of summer, on his way to work, he stepped between the cars; the train had stopped just outside 138th Street, and he was tottering on the steel plate, just as the train started up again, when he caught the quick blur. He had no idea what it was, some enormous silver flying thing. It stayed on his retina, an afterburn, all the way through the barbershop day.

It was there, it was his, he owned it. It would not be scrubbed off.

They couldn’t put an underground wall in an acid bath. You can’t buff that. A maximum tag. It was like discovering ice.

On the way home to the projects he rode the middle of the train again, just to check it out, and there it was once more, STEGS 33, fat and lonely in the middle of the tunnel with no other tags to brother it. It flat- fuck- out amazed him that the tagger had gone down into the tunnel and signed and then must just have walked straight back out, past the third rail, up the grimy steps, out the metal grating, into the light, the streets, the city, his name underneath his feet.

He walked across the Concourse then with a swagger, looked across at the taggers who’d been aboveground all day. Pendejos. He had the secret.

He knew the places. He owned the key. He walked past them, shoulders rolling.

He began to ride the subway as often as he could, wondering if the taggers ever brought a flashlight down with them, or if they moved in teams of twos and threes, like the bombers in the train yards, one on the lookout, one with the flashlight, one to tag. He didn’t even mind going downtown to his stepfather’s barbershop anymore. At least the summer McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 170

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job gave him time to ride the rails. At first he pressed his face close to the windows, but then began surfing the cars, kept his gaze on the walls, looking for a sign. He preferred to think of the taggers working alone, blind to the light, except for a match here and there, just to see the outline, or to jazz up a color, or to fill in a blank spot, or to curve out a letter.

Guerrilla work. Never more than half an hour between trains, even late at night. What he liked most were the big freestyle wraparounds. When the train went past he froze them tight in his head, and pulled them around in his mind all day long, followed the lines, the curves, the dots.

He has never once tagged a thing himself, but if he ever got a clear chance, no consequences, no stepfathersmack, no lockdown, he’d invent a whole new style, draw a little black in the blackness, a little white on deep white, or stir it up with some red, white, and blue, screw with the color scheme, put in some ’Rican, some black, go wild and stump them, that’s what it was all about—make them scratch their heads, sit up and take notice. He could do that. Genius, they called it. But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely. He had an idea once. He wanted to get a slide machine, a projector, and put a photograph of his father inside. He wanted to project the image all around the house, so that at every turn his mother would see her gone husband, the one she kicked out, the one he has not seen in twelve years, the one she’d swapped for Irwin. He’d love to project his father there, like the tags, to make him ghostly and real in the darkness.

It’s a mystery to him if the writers ever get to see their own tags, except for maybe one step back in the tunnel after it’s finished and not even dry. Back over the third rail for a quick glance. Careful, or it’s a couple of thousand volts. And even then there’s the possibility a train will come. Or the cops make it down with a spray of flashlights and billy clubs. Or some long- haired puto will step out of the shadows, white eyes shining, knife blade ready, to empty out their pockets, crush and gut. Slam that shit on quick, and out you go before you get busted.

He braces against the shake of the carriage.

Thirty-

third Street.

Twenty- eighth. Twenty- third. Union Square, where he crosses the platform and switches to the 5 train, slips in between the cars, waits for the shudder of movement. No new tags along the walls this morning. Sometimes he thinks he should just buy some cans, hop off the train, and begin spraying, but deep down he knows he doesn’t have what it takes: McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 171

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it’s easier with the camera in his hands. He can photograph them, bring them out of the darkness, lift them up from the alleys. When the train picks up speed he keeps his camera under the flap of his shirt so it doesn’t bounce around. Fifteen pictures already gone from a roll of twenty- four. He’s not even sure any of them will come out. One of the customers in the barbershop gave him the camera last year, one of the downtown hotshots, showing off. Just handed it to him, case and all. Had no idea what to do with it. He threw it behind his bed at first, but then took it out one afternoon and examined it, started clicking what he saw.

Got to like it. Started carrying it everywhere. After a while his mother even paid for the photos to get developed. She’d never seen him so caught up before. A Minolta SR- T 102. He liked the way it fit in his hands.

When he got embarrassed—by Irwin, say, or by his mother, or just coming out into the schoolyard—he could shade his face with the camera, hide behind it.

If only he could stay down here all day, in the dark, in the heat, riding back and forth between the cars, taking shots, getting famous. He heard of a girl, last year, who got the front page of The Village Voice. A picture of a bombed- out car heading into the tunnel at the Concourse. She caught it in the right light, half sun, half dark. The spray of headlights came straight at her and all the tags stretched behind. Right place, right time.

He heard she made some serious money, fifteen dollars or more. He was sure at first it was a rumor, but he went to the library and found the back issue and there it was, with a double spread on the inside too, and her name in the bottom corner of the photos. And he heard there were two kids from Brooklyn out riding the rails, one of them with a Nikon, another with something called a Leica.

He tried it once himself. Brought a picture to The New York Times at the start of summer. A shot of a writer high on the Van Wyck overpass, spraying. A beautiful thing, all caught in shadow, the spray man hanging from ropes, and a couple of puffy clouds in the background. Front- page stuff, he was sure. He took a half- day from the barbershop, even wore a shirt and tie. He walked into the building on Forty- third and said he wanted to see the photo editor, he had a surefire photo, a master shot.

He’d learned the lingo from a book. The security guard, a big tall moreno, made a phone call and leaned across the desk and said: “Just drop the envelope there, bro.”

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“But I want to see the photo editor.”

“He’s busy right now.”

“Well, when’s he unbusy? Come on, Pepe, please?”

The security guard laughed and turned away, once, then twice, then stared at him: “Pepe?”

“Sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Come on, kid. How old?”

“Fourteen,” he said, eyes downcast.

“Horatio José Alger!” said the security guard, his face open with laughter. He made a couple of phone calls but then looked up, eyes hooded, as if he already knew: “Sit right there, man. I’ll tell you when he passes.”

The lobby of the building was all glass and suits and nice smooth calf muscles. He sat for two straight hours until the guard gave him a wink.

Up he went to the photo editor and thrust the envelope in his hand. The guy was eating half a Reuben sandwich. Had a piece of lettuce on his teeth. Would have been a photograph himself. Grunted a thanks and walked out of the building, off down Seventh Avenue, past the peep shows and the homeless vets, with the photo tucked under his arm. He followed him for five blocks, then lost him in the crush. And then he never heard a thing about it after that, not a thing at all. Waited for the phone call but it didn’t come. He even went back to the lobby at the end of three shifts, but the security guard said he could do nothing more.

“Sorry, my man.” Maybe the editor lost it. Or was going to steal it. Or was going to call him any minute. Or had left a message at the barbershop and Irwin forgot. But nothing happened.

He tried a Bronx circular after that, a shitty little neighborhood rag, and even they flat-out said no: he heard someone chuckling on the other end of the telephone. Someday they’d come crawling up to him. Someday they’d lick his sneakers clean. Someday they’d be clambering over themselves to get at him. Fernando Yunqué Marcano. Imagist. A word he liked, even in Spanish. Made no sense but had a nice ring to it. If he had a card, that’s what he would put on it. FERNANDO Y. MARCANO. IMAGIST. THE

BRONX. U.S.A.

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knocking bricks out of buildings. It was funny, but he understood it in a way. The way the building looked different afterward. The way the light came through. Making people see differently. Making them think twice.

You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has. It’s the sort of thing he thinks about while sweeping the floor, dunking the scissors, stacking the shave bottles. All the hotshot brokers coming in for a short back and sides. Irwin said there was art in a haircut. “Biggest gallery you’re ever going to get. The whole of New York City at your fingertips.” And he would think, Ah, just shut up, Irwin. You ain’t my old man. Shut up and sweep. Clean the comb bottles yourself. But he was never quite able to say it. The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That’s where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others, the brush- off.

The train shudders and he presses nonchalantly with the palm of his hands on each car to keep himself steady, and the engine gets going, but then stops again with a quick halt, a screech of brakes, and he is shunted sideways, his shoulder taking the brunt of the whack and his leg presses hard against the chains. He quickly checks the camera. Perfect. No problem. His favorite moment, this. Stopped dead. In the tunnel, near the mouth. But still in the dark. He catches the metal lip of the door with his fingers. Rights himself and leans once more against the door.

Nonchalance. Ease. In the dark of tunnel now. Between Fulton and Wall Street. All the suits and haircuts getting ready to pile out.

There is no new rumble from the train and he likes these silences, gives him time to scope out the walls. He takes a quick look down the car to make sure there’re no cops, places one foot on the chains and shunts himself up, grabs the lip of the car, one- arms himself high. If he stood on the roof he could touch the curve of the tunnel—good place for a tag—

but he holds on to the lip of the car and peers out over the edge. Some red and white markings on the walls where they curve. A few yellow lights sulfurous in the distance.

He waits for his eyes to adjust, for the little retina stars to leave. Along the rear distance of the train, small bars of color bleed out from the edge of each car and spray outward. Nothing on the walls, though. A tagging Antarctica. What did he expect? Hardly going to be any writers downtown. But you never know. That would be the genius. That would be the point. Buff this, maricón.

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He feels the chain jiggle beneath his feet, the first warning of movement, and he holds a little tighter to the rim of the car. None of the bombers ever get the ceiling. Virgin territory. He should start a movement himself, a brand- new space. He looks out along the length of the train, then goes a little higher on his toes. At the far end of the tunnel, he spies a patch of what could be paint on the east wall, a tag he hasn’t seen before, something quick and oblong, with what looks like a tinge of red around silver, a P or an R or an 8, maybe. Clouds and flames. He should make his way back through the cars—among the dead and dreaming—

and get closer to the wall, decipher the tag, but just then the train jolts a second time and it’s a warning signal—he knows it—he hops back down, braces himself. As the wheels grind, he trills the sighting through his mind, matches it up against all the old tags in other parts of the tunnel, and he figures it’s brand new, it must be, yes, and he gives a quiet fist pump—someone’s come and tagged downtown.

Within seconds the train is in the pale station light of Wall Street and the doors are hissing open, but his eyes are closed and he is mapping it out, the height, the color, the depth of the new tag, trying to put a geogra-phy on it for the way home, where he can take it back, own it, photograph it, make it his.

A radio sound. The static moving toward him. He leans out. Cops.

Coming up from the end of the platform. They’ve seen him, for sure.

Going to drag him out, give him a ticket. Four of them, belts jiggling. He slides open the door to the car, ducks inside. Waits for the slap of a hand on his shoulder. Nothing. He leans back against the cool metal of the door. Catches sight of them sprinting out past the turnstiles. Like there’s some fire to get to. All of them clanging. Handcuffs and guns and nightsticks and notepads and flashlights and God knows what else. Someone’s bought it, he thinks. Someone’s gone and bought it.

He squeezes sideways through the closing doors, holding the camera sideways so it doesn’t get scratched. Behind him, the door hisses shut. A jaunt in his step. Out the turnstile and up the stairs. To hell with the barbershop. Irwin can wait.

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It’s early in the morning and the fluorescents are flickering. We’re taking a break from the graphics hack. Dennis gets the blue-box program running through the PDP- 10 to see if we can catch a good hook.

It’s Dennis, Gareth, Compton, and me. Dennis is the oldest, almost thirty. We like to call him Grandpa—he did two tours in ’Nam. Compton graduated U.C. Davis. Gareth’s been programming for must be ten years.

Me, I’m eighteen. They call me the Kid. I’ve been hanging out at the institute since I was twelve.

—How many rings, guys? says Compton.

—Three, says Dennis, like he’s already bored.

—Twenty, says Gareth.

—Eight, I say.

Compton flicks a look at me.

—The Kid speaks, he says.

True enough, most of the time I just let my hackwork do the talking.

It’s been like that since I sneaked in the basement door of the institute, back in ’68. I was out skipping school, a kid in short pants and broken glasses. The computer was spitting out a line of ticker tape and the guys McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 176

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at the console let me watch it. The next morning they found me sleeping on the doorstep: Hey, look, it’s the Kid.

Nowadays I’m here all day, every day, and the truth is I’m the best hacker they got, the one who did all the patches for the blue- box program.

The line gets picked up on the ninth ring and Compton slaps my shoulder, leans into the microphone, and says to the guy in his smooth clip so as not to freak him out: Hi, yeah, don’t hang up, this is Compton here.

—Excuse me?

—Compton here, who’s this?

—Pay phone.

—Don’t hang up.

—This is a pay phone, sir.

—Who’s speaking?

—What number’re you looking for . . . ?

—I have New York, right?

—I’m busy, man.

—Are you near the World Trade Center?

—Yeah, man, but . . .

—Don’t hang up.

—You must’ve got a wrong number, man.

The line goes dead. Compton hits the keyboard and the speed dial kicks in and there’s a pickup on the thirteenth ring.

—Please don’t hang up. I’m calling from California.

—Huh?

—Are you near the World Trade Center?

—Kiss my ass.

We can hear a half- chuckle as the phone gets slammed down. Compton pings six numbers all at once, waits.

—Hi, sir?

—Yes?

—Sir, are you in the vicinity of downtown New York?

—Who’s this?

—We’re just wondering if you could look up for us?

—Very funny, ha- ha.

The line goes dead again.

—Hello, ma’am?

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—I’m afraid you must have the wrong number.

—Hello! Don’t hang up.

—I’m sorry, sir, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.

—Excuse me . . .

—Try the operator, please.

—Bite me, says Compton to the dead line.

We’re thinking that we should pack it all in and go back to the graphics hack. It’s four or five in the morning, and the sun’ll soon be coming up. I guess we could even go home if we wanted to, catch a few zees instead of sleeping under the desks like usual. Pizza boxes for pillows and sleeping bags among the wires.

But Compton hits the enter key again.

It’s a thing we do all the time for kicks, blue- boxing through the computer, to Dial- A- Disc in London, say, or to the weather girl in Melbourne, or the time clock in Tokyo, or to a phone booth we found in the Shetland Islands, just for fun, to blow off steam from the programming. We loop and stack the calls, route and reroute so we can’t be traced. We go in first through an 800 number just so we don’t have to drop the dime: Hertz and Avis and Sony and even the army recruiting center in Virginia. That tickled the hell out of Gareth, who got out of ’Nam on a 4- F. Even Dennis, who’s worn his OCCIDENTAL DEATH T- shirt ever since he came home from the war, got off on that one big- time too.

One night we were all lazing around and we hacked the code words to get through to the president, then called the White House. We layered the call through Moscow just to fool them. Dennis said: I have a very urgent message for the president. Then he rattled off the code words. Just a moment, sir, said the operator. We nearly pissed in our pants. We got past two other operators and were just about to get through to Nixon himself, but Dennis got the jitters and said to the guy: Just tell the president we’ve run out of toilet paper in Palo Alto. That cracked us up, but for weeks afterwards we kept waiting for the knock on the door. It became a joke after a while: we started calling the pizza boy Secret Agent Number One.

It was Compton who got the message on the ARPANET this morning—it came over the AP service on the twenty- four- hour message board.

We didn’t believe it at first, some guy walking the wires high above New York, but then Compton got on the line with an operator, pretended he was a switchman, testing out some verification trunks on the pay phones, McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 178

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said he needed some numbers down close to the World Trade buildings, part of an emergency line analysis, he said, and then we programmed the numbers in, skipped them through the system, and we each took bets on whether he’d fall or not. Simple as that.

The signals bounce through the computer, multifrequency bips, like something on a flute, and we catch the guy on the ninth ring.

—Uh. Hello.

—Are you near the World Trade Center, sir?

—Hello? ’Scuse me?

—This is not a joke. Are you near the World Trades?

—This phone was just ringing out here, man. I just . . . I just picked it up.

He’s got one of those New York accents, young but grouchy, like he’s smoked too many cigarettes.

—I know, says Compton, but can you see the buildings? From where you’re standing? Is there someone up there?

—Who is this?

—Is there someone up there?

—I’m watching him right now.

—You what?

—I’m watching him.

—Far out! You can see him?

—I been watching him twenty minutes, more, man. Are you . . . ?

This phone just rang and I—

—He can see him!

Compton slaps his hands against the desk, takes out his pocket pro-tector, and flings it across the room. His long hair goes flying around his face. Gareth dances a little jig over by the printout table and Dennis walks by and takes me in a light headlock and knuckles my scalp, like he doesn’t really care, but he likes to see us get our kicks, like he’s still the army sergeant or something.

—I told you, shouts Compton.

—Who’s this? says the voice.

—Far out!

—Who the hell is this?!

—Is he still on the tightrope?

—What’s going on? Are you messing with me, man?

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—Is he still there?

—He’s been up there twenty, twenty- five minutes!

—All right! Is he walking?

—He’s going to kill himself.

—Is he walking?

—No, he’s stopped right now!

—Standing there?

—Yeah!

—He’s just standing there? Midair?

—Yeah, he’s got the bar going. Up and down in his hands.

—In the middle of the wire?

—Near the edge.

—How near?

—Not too near. Near enough.

—Like what? Five yards? Ten yards? Is he steady?

—Steady as shit! Who wants to know? What’s your name?

—Compton. Yours?

—José.

—José? Cool. José. ¿Qué onda, amigo?

—Huh?

—¿Qué onda, carnal?

—I don’t speak Spanish, man.

Compton hits the mute button and punches Gareth’s shoulder.

—Can you believe this guy?

—Just don’t lose him.

—I’ve seen SAT questions with more brains than this one.

—Just keep him on the line, man!

Compton leans into the console and takes the mike again.

—Can you tell us what’s happening, José?

—Tell you what, man?

—Like, describe it.

—Oh. Well, he’s up there . . .

—And?

—He’s just standing.

— And . . . ?

—Where’re you calling from, anyway?

—California.

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—Seriously.

—I am serious.

—You’re fucking with me, right?

—No.

—This a hoax, man?

—No hoax, José.

—Are we on TV? We’re on TV, ain’t we?

—We haven’t got TV. We’ve got a computer.

—A what?

—It’s complicated, José.

—You telling me I’m talking to a computer?

—Don’t worry about it, man.

—What is this? Is this Candid Camera? Are you looking at me right now? Am I on?

—On what, José?

—I’m on the show? Ah, come on, you’ve got a camera here somewhere. Come clean, man. For real. I love that show, man! Love it!

—This is not a show.

—Are you Allen Funt, man?

—What?

—Where’re your cameras? I don’t see no cameras. Hey, man, are you in the Woolworth Building? Is that you up there? Hey!

—I’m telling you, José, we’re in California.

—You’re trying to tell me I’m talking to a computer?

—Sort of.

—You’re in California . . . ? People! Hey, people!

He says it real loud, holding the receiver out, and we can hear voices chattering, and the wind, and I guess it’s one of those pay phones in the middle of the street, covered in stickers with sexy girls and all, and we can hear some sirens going in the background, big high whoops, and a woman laughing, and a few muffled shouts, a car horn, a vendor roaring about peanuts, some guy saying he’s got the wrong lens, he needs a better angle, and some other guy shouting: Don’t fall!

—People! he says again. I got this nutjob here. Guy from California.

Go figure. Hey. You there?

—I’m here, José. Is he up there still?

—You’re a friend of his?

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—No.

—How did you know, then? If you’re calling in?

—It’s complicated. We’re phreaking. We hack the system . . . Man, is he still up there? That’s all I want to know.

He pulls the phone away again and his voice sways.

—Where you from again? he shouts.

—Palo Alto.

—No kidding?

—Honestly, José.

—He says the guy’s from Palo Alto! What’s his name?

—Compton.

—The guy’s name is Compton! Yeah, Comp- ton! Yeah. Yeah. Just a minute. Hey, man, there’s a guy here wants to know, Compton what?

What’s his last name?

—No, no, my name is Compton.

—What’s his name, man, his name?

—José, can you just tell me what’s happening?

—Can I have some of what you’re on? You’re tripping, aren’t you? You really a friend of his? Hey! Listen up! I got some whackjob on the phone from California. He says the guy’s from Palo Alto. The tightrope walker’s from Palo Alto.

—José, José. Listen to me a moment, please, okay?

—We got a bad line. What’s his name?

—I don’t know!

—I think we got a bad connection. We got some nutjob. I don’t know, he’s jabbering, man. Computers and shit. Oh, holy shit! Holy shit!

—What, what?

—Holy freakin’ shit.

—What? Hello?

—No!

—José? You there?

— Jes- us.

—Hello, you there?

—Jesus H.

—Hello?

—I can’t believe it.

—José!

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—Yeah, I’m here! He just hopped. Did you see that?

—He what?

—He, like, hopped. Holy freakin’ shit!

—He jumped?

—No!

—He fell?

—No, man.

—He’s dead?

—No, man!

—What?

—He hopped from foot to foot! He’s wearing black, man. You can see it. He’s still up there! This guy’s awesome! Holy shit! I thought he was a goner. He just went up on one foot and the other, oh, man!

—He hopped?

—’Zactly.

—Like a bunny hop?

—More like a scissors thing. He just . . . Man! Fuck me. Oh, man.

Fuck me running backwards. He just like did a little scissors thing. On the wire, man!

—Far out.

—Can you freakin’ believe that? He a gymnast or something? He looks like he’s dancing. Is he a dancer? Hey, man, is your friend a dancer?

—He’s not really my friend, José.

—I swear to Christ he must be tied to something, or something. Tied to the wire. I bet he’s tied. He’s up there and he just did the scissors thing! Far freakin’ out.

—José. Listen up. We’ve got a bet going here. What’s he look like?

—He’s holding it, man, holding it.

—Can you see him well?

—Like a speck. Like a little thing! He’s way the fuck up there. But he hopped. He’s in black. You can see his legs.

—Is it windy?

—No. It’s muggy as shit.

—It’s not windy?

—Up there it’s gotta be windy, man. Jesus! He’s, like, all the way up there. I don’t know how the fuck they’re going to get him down. They got pigs up there. Lots of ’em.

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—Huh?

—They got cops. Swarming ’round the top. On both sides.

—They trying to get him?

—No. He’s way the fuck out there. He’s standing now. Just holding the bar. Oh, no way! No!

—What? What is it? José?

—He’s crouching. Check this shit out.

—Huh?

—You know, kneeling.

—He’s what?

—He’s sitting now, man.

—What d’you mean he’s sitting?

—He’s sitting on the wire. This guy is sick!

—José?

—Check it out!

—Hello?

There’s another silence, his breath against the mouthpiece.

—José. Hey, amigo. José? My friend . . .

—No way.

Compton leans in closer to the computer, the microphone at his lips.

—José, buddy? Can you hear me? José? You there?

—Untrue.

—José.

—I ain’t shittin’ you . . .

—What?

—He’s lying down.

—On the wire?

—Yes on the fucking wire.

—And?

—He’s got his feet hooked in under him. He’s looking up at the sky.

He looks . . . weird.

—And the bar?

—The what?

—The pole?

—Across his stomach, man. This guy is unfuckingreal.

—He’s just lying there?

—Yup.

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—Like taking a nap?

—What?

—Like a siesta?

—Are you trying to mind- fuck me, man?

—Am I . . . what? ’Course not, José. No, no way. No.

There’s a long silence on the phone, like José has just transported himself up there, alongside the tightrope walker.

—José? Hey. Hello. José. How’s he going to get back up, José? José. I mean, if he’s lying down, how’s he going to get back up? Are you sure he’s lying down? José? You there?

—Are you saying I’m a liar?

—No I’m just, like, speaking.

—Tell me this, man. You’re in California?

—Yeah, man.

—Prove it.

—I can’t really . . .

Compton mutes himself once again.

—Can someone pass me the hemlock?

—Get someone else, says Gareth. Tell him to give the phone to someone.

—Some guy who can read, at least.

—His name’s José and the dude can’t even speak Spanish!

He leans right back in.

—Do me a favor there, José. Can you pass the phone along?

—Why?

—We’re doing an experiment.