9

Maybe there’s more to the eye than meets it. Were Jane and Nurse Bloor and the universe real, or was I trapped in a virtual reality video game being played by some snaggle-toothed, teenaged alien being with acne, vast powers and a history of extended bouts of narcoleptic blackouts? So one second I’m sitting in Doyle’s office and the next it’s roughly seven months later with me on the Cyclone, a roller-coaster ride at Coney Island, as we’re starting down the first big vertical drop with my stomach going weightless and me yelling my head off in the middle of May. I’m not saying that I “time tripped,” you know, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, although it also wasn’t Rip Van Winkle being wakened from a sleep of two hundred years by the roar of a 747 flying low overhead and him shaking his fist at the sky while cursing Mendel and “every other lame-brained, dipshit geneticist” who might have collaborated in the breeding of mosquitoes to such a titanic size and shouting hoarsely at the jet plane’s contrails, “What’s the goddamn good of it, man, would you tell me?” I not only knew that time had passed but also how it had passed: that it was almost summer, and that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor and Jane was still vanished from the face of the earth. Yes, I knew these things, but not as I would have if I’d actually lived them.

It was more like a movie I’d seen.

The mighty Cyclone clattered to a gradual stop. I got off and started glancing all around me furtively and probably with big white eyeballs rolling around like Peter Lorre being hunted by the mob in M, which of course was not exactly my situation, although the way I used to look at things then it was close. It seems Sister Louise, in her bountiful view that even morons and future wanted criminals like us should have some modicum of mercy and reward against the chance that, as the dreaded statewide Regents Exams approached, we might suddenly rebel and start nailing heretical and scurrilous theses to the massive St. Stephen’s Church’s doors reading:

Who Is to Say When a Sin Is Mortal?

So a few weeks before, and in her usual froggy voice, the good sister had decreed for us a “stately pleasure dome” by which she could have meant a cool and quiet pond with giant lily pads floating on its glassy surface, although in fact she meant our class would have a school day spent instead at Coney Island, which was great, but then each of us boys was to pair off with one of the girls for the day and pay their way for all the rides. Yes. Getting to Know Me. We got paired up in a raffle of sorts, picking numbers out of a box, but instead of a regular number, instead I got the dreaded Treasure Island “black spot,” the notoriously gloomy Vera Virago. But never mind. No biggie. Okay? And I was totally with the program until we got to Coney and I sniffed that sea air and the sweet smell of taffy enfolded in that rich, wet aroma of those crinkled and salted potato fries and grilled hot dogs with mustard and relish from Nathan’s, which is when Satan swooped down and grabbed me, then took me to the top of the Parachute Jump, where he sweepingly gestured at the goodies below while at the same time cupping his hand against my ear as he whispered, “All these and lots more do I offer you, Joey! Dump Virago and double your well-deserved pleasure! Didn’t you toil and slave toting bags for old ladies for that dollar and eighty cents that you’ve saved, sometimes pissing in your corduroy knickers from depression at even having to talk to them, to answer their dithering questions while your urinary tract was close to bursting and requiring every bit of concentration on your part to prevent you from soiling? No, Joey, there is no free lunch, none at all, and most especially for Vera Virago. Remember how mockingly she laughed when you fell playing touch tag in the school yard, badly skinning both your knees on the pavement? There was blood, a lot of blood, I recall. You know, I doubted my eyes when I saw—or at least I think I saw—well, on top of your hurt she was flipping you ‘The Bird.’ Look, I shouldn’t have said that. Okay? Just forget it. I mean, who knows what I actually saw. Matter of fact I’ve got an eye exam coming up soon for new reading glasses, so there’s at least a five, maybe ten percent chance I was mistaken. She could even have been signaling someone; you know, someone in her club, perhaps some secret sign of friendship between them. And then who knows what ‘The Bird’ sign means in Albania, Joey, or to the Huaorani tribes of the Amazon. Okay? Let’s not buy trouble. Oh, well, yes, yes, I know; I know her whole pathetic story: how she’s suffered from severe depression and is so deeply and neurotically insecure that if it isn’t taken care of by the time she’s twenty-one she’ll go to bars and then slip herself a date-rape drug. Is that really your concern, Joey? Really? I don’t think so. Meantime, look, Joey! Look! Look down at Nathan’s! Fresh fries are coming out, all ready for Total Catsup Immersion! Think how many you could eat without having to share with that totally vicious, unscrupulous bitch who only yesterday…No. No, forget it. I’m sorry. No, really. I mean it. I misspoke. I misspoke and that’s the end of it. It would have been overkill and totally unnecessary—you have reason enough to owe the girl nothing without even going into what she said about your father.”

At Luna Park Virago’s blouse got all wet from the Splash Ride, not to mention a dime now already down the drain, and she had to make a stop at a restroom. You see? Have patience and your chance comes on little rat feet, because the second Virago was out of sight I made my break from Camp Chivalry, running as fast as I could to Steeplechase Park, where I plunked down my nickel admission, was forced to take the metal racehorse ride with the danger of its full visibility, and then skulked through the total, safe darkness of the Spook House, where I stumbled along through twists and turns, passing monster and vampire heads jumping out with these keening shrieks, which were the only sounds I heard for a while, it being a Thursday when school wasn’t out yet except for us mackerel snappers who were constantly threatening to take over the government if only some imbeciles in Congress were to sunder the wall between church and state by giving St. Stephen’s fifty dollars for books, whereupon we would immediately reinstate burnings at the stake and all the fun we once had with Torquemada, in whose memory we would rename the White House the “Spanish House,” all of this, of course, in our “First One Hundred Days.” Meantime, turning a corner in the darkness I made a sudden stop and then took a step backward. Someone facing me was blocking my path. I said, “Hey!” I got back silence, and I took another quiet step back. So did he. Or it. Or whatever. I said, “Hey, there! What’s up? What’s going on?” Still no answer. I was nervous, even starting to be scared. “Come on, who are you?” I hollowly uttered, once again maturely assuming the initiative. Then after another little waiting silence and deciding that I’d had quite enough, I loudly called out, “Brux!” which was a word I’d made up and often used to dispel evil spirits most years of my life, and as none to this date had successfully attacked me, the preponderance of the evidence seemed to say that it worked. Okay, fine, so I admit I took another step backward, which is when this stupid phantom stepped back as well, whereupon I, the El Bueno—the staggering genius who, years before, had discovered and announced to his dumbfounded second-grade classmates that “duty” had a meaning unrelated to bowel movements—suddenly realized I’d been talking to a full-length mirror! “Are you just my reflection, you embarrassing, naturally perfected asshole?” I erupted. “My God, I feel sorry for you! Really! I feel so sorry I’m going to puke!” And then from somewhere up ahead of me—from around another corner, really—I heard somebody sniffling and weeping in the darkness. A child. And then came the frightened cry of a sobbing little girl: “It’s too dark in here!”

Well, I fumbled and groped my way through the blackness until finally I got to her. She was huddled on the floor in a corner quietly sobbing into her hands, her little elbows propped on dimpled knees. Dim amber light from a vampire bust on the wall just above her showed her to be maybe about five years old and wearing a light blue calico dress and shiny black patent leather shoes. Obviously a Catholic. “Hey, where are your folks?” I asked her very quietly, afraid of scaring her even more. But at the sound of my voice she abruptly quit crying and looked up at me with a grin. I couldn’t quite make out her face but there were pigtails.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Did my mom send you to get me?”

I said, “No. But I’ll bet anything she’s right outside. Come on, let’s find her.”

I reached down and she took my hand and I pulled her to her feet. She was lighter than a sackful of White Castle burgers. She said, “Thank you,” and together, hand in hand, we cautiously groped our way out into sunlight and the far cry of gulls and “I’m fucking soaked!” from some girl on the Splash Ride at Luna Park. I quickly scanned the area, but no parent, no big brother or sister was waiting. I looked down at her face. Redheaded and freckled, she was smiling up at me. “Your mom should be along pretty soon,” I told her. I walked her to a bench and we’d just sat down when a sudden thought unnerved me. What if Vera Virago were to exit the Spook House? Double dog damn it! But if someone were to come for the kid, I reasoned, it would have to be here. So we stayed. I kept my eyes on the Spook House exit.

Where was my Barney Google mask when I needed it?

“Don’t worry,” I heard the kid say.

When I turned my head and looked down at her, she was smiling up at me and softly giggled.

“Don’t worry?” I said. “Don’t worry?”

“No one’s coming,” she said, looking mirthful. Then she added: “At least not soon.”

I now decided to employ that expressionless but subtly accusatory tone that I’d learned from watching all of those Charlie Chan movies. “Ah, so!” I said.

Her little hand flew to her mouth to suppress another giggle. I just stared until her smile went away and she looked solemn. And so what weirdness was this, I was wondering, flummoxed because I wasn’t about to ask some four- or five- or six-year-old girl if she read minds for a living or only for her friends, and then…“Only for my friends,” she piped up. “Special friends.”

Oh, well, my jaw dropped down to my knees! Was this real?

My amazing seventh-grade intellect, wider than the wingspan of the Inca condor goddess Louise, said I’d have to think of something that would completely eliminate coincidence, and then quicker than Hamlet could dream up his play-within-a-play designed to make his father’s killer jump up from his seat in a Perry Mason moment shouting, “Okay, I did it, you fucks! Guard, seize me!”—this followed by a diatribe about the murdered old King Hamlet “stinking up the throne room” with his herring-scented aftershave lotion—I called to mind my seventh-place prize-winning entry in a poetry contest back in third grade and thought to test the kid’s telepathic powers by asking her for its title, but then even before I could pose the question the kid was reciting the poem!

“Kid, who or what are you?” I gasped.

“Oh, for God’s sakes, Joey! It’s me!”

“‘It’s me?’ Who’s me?”

“I’m Jane, you dumb poop! Your Jane!”

I was stone. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk.

“I really am,” she said. “If you’ll just look at me closely you’ll see.”

When the blood had quit pulsing through the vein in my forehead, I stared and, by God! I could almost see it: the freckles, the red hair in pigtails with the smiley-face barrettes at the end, and then, after she pointed to it, the little circle with the X inside it on her cheek!

There’s something wrong with me, I thought.

This was bonkers.

“Oh, come on,” she cajoled in her piping voice. “Gunga Din, Joey? Blueberry pie and chocolate ice cream? Tokay?”

Nonplussed, I could only gape and numbly nod.

She turned her glance to the exit from Steeplechase Park, then stood up and took my hand. “Come on, let’s go,” she said. “Vera’s coming. She’s getting on a big metal horsey right now.”

I stood up and said dazedly, “Who paid?”

She said, “Sister Louise. Sister also offered a reward of a dollar for your capture.” She tugged at my hand. “Come on, Joey. The boardwalk should be safe for a while. We’ll go down to the end where there’s almost no people.”

That time I’d played the hook at Times Square and right after I’d seen another movie plus live on stage Woody Herman’s “Big Band” orchestra with this skinny young crooner Frank Sinatra that these young lolly-dollies in bobby socks were screaming and swooning over with me wondering if all of them were playing the hook too, either that or if they went to some hardcore atheist high school that let them out at noon to get swacked on elderberry juice and celebrate “Stonehenge Day,” right afterward I’d coughed up a shiny new dime to get into an exhibit called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” where I wound up goggle-eyed watching magicians who did stuff that I thought was impossible, which at the time I thought was good, but then afterward thought was bad, for what I wanted was a world with order and complete explanations for everything in it.

But now a pigtailed miracle was holding my hand.

We were walking past a popcorn stand’s wafting aromas that were calling to me as seductively as the sirens once sang to Ulysses, “Here we are, Joey! Come to us! Come! Be the first in your school to commit the sin of gluttony!” when I stopped and looked down at “Child X.” So the kid was telepathic. So what? That didn’t make her Jane. Okay? It did not. Further, any kid with money could have bribed our sleazy waiter at that cheapo Italian restaurant into spilling his guts about the blueberry pie and chocolate ice cream. Correct? I mean, isn’t that the “scientific method” that’s used by every physicist whose last name is Letterman to argue that creation by a “God” is preposterous, their only answer to the massive number of “coincidences” making it a virtual impossibility that the universe wasn’t designed for the appearance of man being, “Idiots! Has it never occurred to you that there might be an infinite number of universes, in which case there would have to be at least one of them with all these coincidences? I mean, Duuhhhhhhh!” an expression rendered even more unattractive when uttered by someone with severe radiation burns on his hands. In the meantime, and I mention this only in passing, I was almost dumbstruck into near insensibility by the awe in which my hero-worshiping young self, five-time duplicate member of the Doc Savage Club, held the stubbornly dogged and steadfast faith of all those thousands of scientists who believed that evolution was as “guided” as a red Ferrari with a drunken and bitter Ma Joad behind the wheel, and that after millennia of blindly groping, somehow nature and chance produced the first chicken, to which my first reaction was, “Why, for godssakes? Are you kidding?” For a time I stuffed my doubts. Never mind that the answer from my heroes of science to, “Why would a brain or an eye want to form?” was “To help you survive,” with their answer to my follow-up, “Why should I survive?” turning out to be the profoundest and deepest silence since the elderly Rasputin approached Queen Victoria at a palace ball and requested a “private dance.” One day I’d mentioned all of this to Baloqui, who, grimacing, then lowering and shaking his head, said broodingly, “Listen, there’s a much bigger problem here, Joey,” and when I said, “What?” he looked up into the distance with his patented pensively frowning “At least I think it was” phony look, and proceeded to ruminate that without an astounding coincidence as yet unclaimed by the Holy Ghost, specifically the appearance of a fully evolved rooster at the very same time, not to mention the very same continent as the fully evolved first chicken, “Joey, where did the second chicken come from?” he said.

Details. Never mind. Science ruled.

So I dredged for more proof that this really was Jane.

“What was the last thing on the East River walkway that you said to me about my father?” I asked her, and then I instantly threw up an impenetrable wall of white noise around my mind that no telepath could possibly penetrate, a feat that I accomplished by shutting my eyes and mentally reciting over and over the lyrics of the hit song “Three Little Fishies”:

“Joey!”

The kid snapped me out of it sharply.

“I told you that he loved you and to be good to him.”

Wham! And then of all the dumb luck, who do I see chatting and coming our way but Baloqui and Winifred Brady! When he saw me Baloqui stopped short for a second, maybe thinking of yelling, “Hey, I’ve got him! I’ve captured El Cheapo!” But then the two of them slowly started ambling toward us again. I looked down at Miss Enigma of 1941 and hoarsely whispered, “I thought you said the boardwalk was safe!”

And she hissed back, “Okay, so I thought it was safe! I never said I was a fucking oracle!”

My God! I thought. This really is Jane!

“Hiya, Joey! How ya doin’?”

Baloqui and Brady were now standing in front of us.

I said, “Fine, Baloqui. Fine. Where’s the gang?”

“They’re around.”

“Yeah, I thought so. Good. That’s good.”

For a second Baloqui eyed me inscrutably, then he lowered his droopy, dark gaze to Jane. “Who’s your friend?”

“You mean you see her?”

Baloqui looked up at me, squinting and knitting his brow.

He said, “What?”

I said, “I think she’s something to see.”

Baloqui turned his head to exchange blank looks with Brady, then back to me, his black eyes crammed with suspicion, although of what he as usual had no idea. “You look relieved,” he observed. “Why is that?”

“I guess it’s just the kind of hairpin I am.”

Baloqui shrugged. “Free country.”

He returned his gaze to Jane. “So who is she?” he asked.

“My niece.”

“You got a niece, El Bueno? Since when?”

“Since she was born,” I replied under color of invincible thickheadedness. “She’s here visiting from Peru,” I then added.

Jane looked down and put a hand to her head and slowly shook it, while, as usual, Winnie Brady continued to say nothing, mutely staring with wide blue eyes, her forte.

“From Peru,” Baloqui echoed flatly. He was staring in a way I hadn’t seen since that time I was ticked at him over beating me badly at Monopoly and to wound him I’d quoted a made-up travel expert writing in Holiday Magazine that Manhattan was “by far a more glamorous, vibrant and exciting city than either Barcelona or Seville,” at which Baloqui had lifted his chin and with a look of glacial ice mixed with lukewarm pity said, “Even the Devil can quote scripture out of context.” It was the single black eyebrow sickling up that was the killer: it would have turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of guava jelly laced with pull-string recordings of her constant “I need my space!” total bullshit, although now she really needed it, you could say.

“Yes, from Lima,” I said. And then, after a pause, I quietly added, “Or thereabouts.” And at this Jane set up a howl of crying and sobbing.

I looked down and said, “What’s wrong, little niece?”

“I have to go baffoom!” she bawled.

His inner vision always turned to an azure sky where puffy cloudlets tinted gold and vermillion by a constantly setting sun framed his pantheon of Apollo, Zeus and Manolete, Baloqui flinched, the corner of his mouth pulling back in a grimace of both fear and distaste at the mention of eliminatory matters, this coupled with a dread of even more to come, such as “ka-ka,” or “DaVinci Dew,” or, worst of all in his mind, “number two,” in the presence of Brady in this halcyon, taffy-scented glow of the day. Taking hold of Brady’s hand and with a stare in which a clear threat of maiming could be detected, he growled, “That dollar reward’s a lot of money, El Bueno. As long as I am silent you are safe. You owe me!” With this he turned and they walked away, and with my eyes on Brady’s back, in the movie screen of my mind I saw the actor Jack La Rue, always typecast as a gangster, standing beneath a lamppost looking menacing—his only look—while flipping a quarter in the air and catching it over and over, which he did in every movie he was in, his movie dialogue now sounding in my head with a boomy echo-chamber effect:

When Baloqui and Brady were far enough away, Jane abruptly quit bawling to look up at me deadpan and utter, “I thought they’d never leave. Listen, Joey, I’m hungry. Can we eat somewhere now?”

I said, “You eat?”

“What does that mean?” she said, glowering up at me, and after telling her that I had no idea, hand in hand we started walking toward a modest little eatery I’d once seen at the end of the boardwalk where I thought there’d be almost no chance of another highly dangerous “brief encounter”—in particular with Vera Virago. I had to take baby steps so Jane could keep up, and as we walked I looked down at her pigtails and curly red mop, still trying to figure out what was happening. The time jumps. Jane. Were I older I’d have thought about bizarre disorders of the brain, like in that book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but back then I was lost. At times I’d just helplessly snicker and shake my head, and once even wondered if I was just dreaming, except the dream was too long and the Nathan’s aromas too pungent. I mean, I see things and I’ve heard things in my dreams but never smelled them.

This was real.

Whatever that was.