He drifted disconsolately through the dark apartment and glanced at the irregular mosaic of lighted windows in the other apartment buildings, rows of yellow rectangles, people inside them-sort of like airplanes at night, he thought-and, there, as he stood in the dark, that thought was what brought the lost dream rushing back to him, except that it had not been a dream, it had actually happened the previous night on the flight from Hong Kong. He had put his inflatable pillow around his neck when the cabin lights dimmed, slipped on his sleeping mask, kicked off his shoes, taken his little blue capsule, pushed the seat back, and fallen into a deep sleep. But then, a few hours later, he had woken suddenly, his pillow hot against his neck like a giant finger curling around it menacingly, the sleep mask a veil pressing against his open eyes. He had leaned forward in his seat, coldly aware, frightened even. Around him the other passengers slept. He stood, not quite knowing why, and in his socks walked slowly back along the plane, a wide-body 767, his back aching a bit, his hands skimming each seat rest, passing row upon row of sleeping passengers. Businessmen, teenagers, young wives and husbands, babies, retired couples, slouched and fallen and slumped against one another with unknowing intimacy, heavy, unmoving, as if- dead, they all looked dead, he'd thought, gliding silently along the aisle, the soft, open-mouth faces illuminated by the emergency exit signs. He slipped toward the galley at the back of the plane, expecting to see the stewardesses talking or doing their chores, or perhaps a few passengers waiting to use the bathrooms, but no one was there. The stewardesses had fallen asleep in their seats, heads tilted backward, faces still bright with makeup like mannequins, cheeks pink, lips red, hair pinned neatly back, but eyes closed and the cheeriness of them gone. He glanced up at the computer graphic on all the screens that cycled through indications of the plane's global position, the tailwind, the ground speed-609 mph, he remembered-and the estimated time of arrival. They would all get to New York the next day, having all been dead together if only a moment, which, of course, was a reversal of the true nature of things-that they were alive together only a moment, all time prior never possessed and all time following forever lost. Six hundred and nine mph, tailwind 58 mph, didn't seem that fast to Charlie, not fast at all, really, and not because he had flown more than twice as fast on many occasions. No, such a speed was nothing when you saw how fast time itself was flashing forward-mockingly, tauntingly, a piece of trick-mirror light jumping discontinuously in front of him, uncatchable. Six hundred miles an hour, by contrast, was nothing, a pitiful speed, standstill, virtually flowing backward; it could get you from Hong Kong to New York City in seventeen hours, but nowhere beyond that.
215 East Fourth Street, Manhattan September 9, 1999
The Dep had lied, fluttering some cheap piece of paper like that. It was a trick; she hadn't been released, she had merely been transferred to Rikers Island-the same place she'd started her incarceration, the largest penal colony in the world, sitting upriver from Manhattan. A fortress of the lost, a vault of the doomed. A deck of criminal faces, shuffled every day. The women's facility, officially the Rose M. Singer Center, was known as Rosie's House or Lesbian Island. Many of the women, just arrested, were coming down off drugs or crying about their children. The ones who needed their hit vomited from time to time or sat rocking back and forth, sweating, weeping, chewing their bottom lips. She herself had uttered almost nothing to anybody, just let it be known in a dead voice that she'd put in four years in Bedford, where you go only for hard time. Think about that, girl, if you need to think about me. She had other things to worry about. The letter announcing her release was, upon reflection, the perfect ruse; after reading it, she hadn't protested her exit from Bedford Hills, or told anybody why she was going. But the Manhattan D.A.'s Office didn't just let people out of prison. Not unless something strange had happened. She had an idea why Tony Verducci might want her out, a very exact and particular and specific and singular idea, yes, but why the Manhattan D.A.? Not after they had interrogated her for two straight days, even threatening to involve her mother, and yet they'd gotten nothing out of her about Rick and Tony and the others, her refusal to cooperate prompting them to throw the book at her, sewing her into a conviction with professional dispatch. But if the Dep's letter had been a trick, why? What had she done? It couldn't be the business with Soft T, because the timing was wrong. The letter had been prepared before she'd even stalked into the Dep's office, and no one but Soft T knew what had happened prior to her arrival. The thing made no sense. She'd see if she could call her lawyer today, Mrs. Bertoli, her crooked and cheap and uninterested lawyer, to find out what was going on; the chances that she could get through, however, were slim to none. And if she did get through, Mrs. Bertoli would want to know how she was going to get paid, and that, of course, was a question with no answer.
The powdered eggs and watered orange juice that Rikers called breakfast would be served in an hour or so. Down the hallway women were talking, begging for cigarettes, arguing. She remembered the particular tone of their anxiety from her month-long stay the first time through. You were in prison, alone, and deeply freaked out. She herself had been a mess of headaches and urinary tract infections, grinding her teeth at night, suffering a bout of shingles. It wasn't until she reached Bedford Hills that she accepted the situation, actually believed it. With its settled population, its levels of prisoner status, Bedford Hills constituted a complete civilization compared to Rosie's House. Many women had lived there a decade or more. They had learned to make the best of it, to seek to improve themselves and the conditions of the prison. They exercised leadership and stability. It was not exactly a city on a hill, but it worked. You could live a bit while dying. It was hard to believe she was really back in Rikers, had fallen even lower. The thought was sickening. I am alone, she thought, I am alone and a prisoner of the great State of New York. I have to my name one garbage bag full of cheap clothes and three hundred and something dollars in an envelope that probably has been stolen by now. I am nowhere, I am nobody.
She lay in her bed going over who would want her out of prison and who would want her in. Rick wanted her out, of course. Her mother wanted her out. The Dep wanted her in. The detective who arrested her wanted her in. Tony Verducci? That was harder to figure. It depended what he knew about the last job. Had he figured out what had happened? Four long years had gone by, so perhaps not. He had once liked her a great deal, after word got around that she was doing Rick's planning for him. The message came to her a few months before her arrest that Tony Verducci wanted to meet with her, and Rick had said she didn't have any choice-when Tony wants to talk to you, you just show up. Of course, it was in Rick's interest to say this. So she'd spent the morning wondering what you wear to a job interview with a mobster, and finally had decided to look as young and stupid as possible. Make him think I'm just a dumb girl, she figured. She'd put on jeans and a tube top and slathered a high-school makeup job onto herself, hoping that Verducci would have second thoughts. His car had arrived for her in the Village and, not quite believing what she was doing, she'd darted out to the open door hoping no one had seen her. The driver's neck was covered with boils. She never saw his face, only heard him grunt an hour later when the car pulled through a gated driveway on Long Island. She was led inside by a tiny old Italian woman to a sun porch, where Tony Verducci sat in a floral shirt, wheezing quietly with an unlit cigar in his mouth and watching a cooking show with the sound turned off.