“But think of the human cost,” Anthikkad said. “Think of poor Ed, the years he could have been spending with his cousin. What if that was you? Wouldn’t you want to know?”
Vikram tried to make eye contact with Wes as the UDP registry argument, now predictably reignited, raged around them in the basement, but Wes’s eyes were shut, as if he were in pain. Vikram, too, stopped listening.
Pikarski’s cousin.
Any of them could know someone who had made it out. One hundred fifty-six thousand was around 2 percent of the population of Greater New York. A small fraction, yet significant. Every UDP had heard anecdotal evidence of someone who’d said good-bye forever to a sister, a husband, or a mother and stepped through the Gate alone, only to be reunited hours or days later when the loved one’s number was chosen. That was how the authorities kept the system going during those desperate days. Don’t despair; maybe you’ll meet again on the other side. That kind of platitude. Didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
If Vikram widened the reckoning of his acquaintance to everyone he’d ever known, every coffee vendor and loan officer, every fencing instructor and fellow Emergency Clinic patient, well. It was hard not to see connections everywhere. Proper names—the list Agnew talked about—wouldn’t have helped here; ferreting out connections so tenuous required a conversation. It became a game they all played, one less serious and intimate than What Did You Take Through, but just as common: Yes, we used to live on that block, but not since the ’90s—was the Youth Home still on the corner when you moved in? I was at that very baseball game, and I remember the score. Yes, that was my favorite place to get my eyebrows threaded! I used to ride the same trolley route to work every day; surely we hung on the same strap, did we ever sit next to each other?
Vikram grabbed Wes’s arm when the session ended. “Have you talked to Dwayne?” He remembered Dwayne had said he had to do something today but, in his excitement about the painting, couldn’t remember what it was.
Wes shrugged. “He texted me earlier that he might not be around, but said that I could get some hours in finishing up, if I wanted. I’m about to head over there to get started on that big bedroom. Want to come?”
He didn’t know about The Shipwreck yet. “I’ve actually got an errand to run. I need to get to Williamsburg, fast. Do you think you can take me?”
He held two fistfuls of Wes’s jacket as they zigzagged up to Eastern Parkway, where they cruised in the far right lane. The top speed Wes’s scooter could muster, according to the dial, was forty-five miles per hour. Vikram struggled to convert that to kilometers per hour and gave up. Compared to subway travel, it seemed fast. He felt he was riding on the wind’s back.
No way to talk over the roar of speed and traffic, and no face shield on the spare helmet. Vikram kept his eyes closed, aware only of the movement of traffic around them. Big cars and big trucks, but no vacuum trailers or rigs—in this world, the cross-borough highways all ran north and west of here. Instead, over Vikram’s shoulder, morning foot traffic and the parade of Crown Heights businesses—hair braiding, Caribbean bread, MoneyGram, fresh fruit, furniture on installment plans—all the innumerable things of this world. Vikram knew where he was. He knew. Still, he was filled with the nonsensical conviction that if he opened his eyes, he would be riding on a blazer in another New Jersey.
He peeked. There, inches from his eyes on the flesh of Wes’s neck: the horrible scar. A world erased.
Just before they hit Prospect Park, Wes steered them onto Bedford Avenue. They coasted past alternating one-ways, a poor neighborhood on their right and a gentrifying one on the left. Why? It was unknowable. At the red light at Wallabout Street, Wes flicked on his turn signal and they zoomed under the BQE toward the water.
When they got to the Domino Sugar complex, Vikram climbed off the scooter and headed straight for the museum entrance without looking back. He’d head over to Brownsville to meet Wes later. As he approached the front door, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. The display read DWAYNE S. Vikram reversed course, walking over to one of the granite seats between the buildings as he picked up the call.
“What’s up,” Dwayne asked, his voice uncharacteristically hoarse. “I saw you been trying to reach me. Something important?”
“I’m about to talk to someone Hel’s been working with—she’s an art history person, works at a museum, has a lot of connections.” He lit a cigarette. “I’ve never met her, but she seems like a good bet for figuring out the provenance of the painting.”
“Oh.”
“The reason I was really calling was to ask if you’d try reaching Hel from your phone. She’s not picking up for my number and I’m getting a little concerned. I’ll text you her number.”
“Mmm. Yeah, I guess.” He sounded extremely unenthusiastic at the prospect.
“Hey, am I interrupting something? Are you at the bowling alley?”
“No. Just taking a day off from everything today.”
That was when it came back to him—Dwayne’s brother’s grave. “Look, man. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Forget about what I asked.” He dragged on his smoke, fighting an intense feeling of foolishness.
Dwayne had lost one person. Vikram had lost everyone. Almost certainly.
The year he left Boston for New York, he went to Union Square with coworkers to see the Halloween bonfires lit. They’d all taken pictures of themselves—him with his now-dead coworkers—the thronging crowd behind, and yes, many of those out-of-focus faces would have been tourists, dead now too, back home in another Nashville or another San Jose. And yes, many of them would have been New Yorkers who didn’t make it through, dead now too in another Morningside Heights or Battery Park. But surely at least one of those strangers had been displaced, too.
What if that was you? Anthikkad had asked. Wouldn’t you want to know?
Cristaudo in the storage unit with her machine, signaling and signaling and never a response.
Knowing for sure would be unbearable.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again.
“It’s OK,” Dwayne said and ended the call.
His phone was still out. To cheer himself, Vikram called up the pictures he’d taken of the painting. Ill lit and blurry but unmistakable.
He crushed the butt under his shoe. Time to go.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Oliveira’s lawyer furnished Hel with cab fare sufficient to get her back to the precinct station house. There, she could recover her vouchered property: her phone and her wallet. The gravity knife, the lawyer warned her, she would never see again. As soon as the courthouse building was out of sight, Hel told the cabdriver to bring her to Old Calvary instead.
They traveled via the Long Island Expressway, the pavement slick and wet, though no rain was in evidence now. Traffic moved fluidly. She shut off the TV screen mounted on the back of the seat in front of her, watching for the approach through the smeared windshield as the driver bobbed his head to the music playing on the radio. A song Hel recognized came on; she hummed the chorus as she tried to place it. Was it one of those awful Dop Peters covers? No, it was just an ordinary top 40 song that had become popular recently, within the time she’d lived here. She’d heard it a million times, no fewer than anyone else.
Now, the newer part of the cemetery spread out below them, extending in every direction, the grave markers indistinct in the mist. Today seemed to her very unlike the day of the evac when she and the others in her entry group walked from one world to another, an intangible seam somewhere in the space between one snowflake and the next. But the grayness was the same, the shrouded sun. Down below, the grass spread like a duvet and the squares of white were Truth cards, the engraved letters and motifs on the face of each one showing the fate of the person lying beneath.