They used big canvas carts from the postal service for garbage or belongings.
They talked and mumbled to themselves, they nodded and talked, lone figures deep in monologue, they gesture to themselves and nod convincingly.
The messiah is here on earth and he is a chunky man in a business suit from the Republic of Korea.
She stood just looking at the spoon sometimes. She told Brita she didn't want to take it with her when she left. It had a new setting now, detached from the burlap, and she was afraid that moving the spoon again might damage it in some mysterious inner way.
She asked everywhere for Omar but he wasn't to be seen except for one time he was sitting on a fire escape with a Spanish woman and it took Karen a while to get him to come down and talk to her. All he said was he was off the corner now. He would have other things to do that he was setting up. He got somebody pregnant in Coney Island that he would have to deal with and Karen felt a deep pause, something in her chest opening to jealousy and loss. Plus there was a man coming around who lyingly claimed Omar had stolen his handgun. A piece of bent metal with a taped handle. She listened to him and felt the weight of those tiled hallways and punctured doors, the crack alleys where women left their babies wrapped in headlines. He told her he didn't miss the corner. He was full of major plans. There were schemes that he could turn to cash. She listened to him and missed him. His gaze tended to drift and she knew he didn't really see her. It made her feel strange, knowing she was about to disappear forever from sight and mind and memory, and there was someone she would think of often and he'd forget who she was, he was forgetting even as she stood there. But that was the weight of his life, those were the turns of phrase she could never understand.
In the worst noise of the subway there was music playing. Saw musicians under stairways and scattered along passages and they had keyboards and amps and violins, they had hi-hat cymbals and wagging saxophones. Gospel preachers worked the turnstiles, testifying strongly. Men sat in the grime with sand pails at their side waiting for a coin to drop. The musicians kept their odds and ends in shopping carts and played with the trains screaming in and announcements coming in gauzy bursts.
The warning aura came when she was alone in the loft. A mercury glow moved up the shanks of the towers out there. She came away from the window with a feeling in her arm that was like running current. She saw zigzags of silvery light and thought at once of the fleeting text that ran around the building in Times Square. Suddenly she knew who had been buried in the news of the day. She saw the lightning-lit word streams and the name she'd missed when she sat in the taxi and the line about weeping chanting mourners in the millions. She groped to the sofa and sat motionless for fifteen minutes, seeing the words streak across the building and go over the edge and continue on the other side. She was able to see the other side. Then the pain and nausea rolled in. She had no sense of time. The light was metallic and intense. Sendero Luminoso. It was right inside her, gleaming out of the pain mass. The beautiful-sounding Shining Path.
She realized Brita was in the room with her now. It was okay now. She kept saying okay. This is a word they know in numerous countries.
That night they sat together on the sofa with the TV juxtaposed against the conversation. They talked and watched. Then they saw what was on and listened to the voice that spoke behind the images.
It was the death of Khomeini.
It was the body of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini lying in a glass case set on a high platform above crowds that stretched for miles. The camera could not absorb the full breadth of the crowd. The camera kept panning but could not inch all the way out to the edge of the anguished mass. On the screen the crowd had no edge or limit and kept on spreading.
The voice said, Crowds estimated, and the picture showed the crowds of mourners and Karen could go backwards into their lives, see them coming out of their houses and shanties, streams of people, then backwards even further, sleeping in their beds, hearing the morning call to prayer, coming out of their houses and meeting in some dusty square to march out of the slums together.
The voice said, Weeping chanting mourners.
There were mourning banners in the streets. Great photographs of Khomeini hung from building walls and many people in the crowd beat themselves on the head and chest.
The voice said, Rivers of humanity, and Karen realized this was the next day now, the funeral, with crowds estimated at three million and everybody dressed in black, all the streets and highways packed with black-clad mourners, and there were people who ran twenty-five miles to the cemetery, ran in grief and mourning, collapsed, carried, pulled along by others, and the roof of a bus fell in under the weight of people trying to see the body.
The voice said, Frenzied mourning. Beating their hands against their heads in grief.
The body was wrapped in a white burial shroud in a refrigerated van that could not get through the streets. Police fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd and make way for the body and there were pictures of fire hoses spraying tight arcs.
The crowd grew and clamored and the van turned back and the body had to be transported to the cemetery by helicopter.
There were aerial shots of the burial site surrounded by crowds. Karen thought they were like pictures of a thousand years ago, some great city falling clamorously to siege.
Then the helicopter landed and the crowds broke through the barriers. The living were trying to bring the dead man back among them.
Karen's hands were over her mouth.
The living forced their way into the burial site, bloodying their heads and tearing at their hair, choking in the thick dust, and the body of Khomeini rested in a flimsy box, a kind of litter with low sides, and Karen found she could go into the slums of south Teheran, backwards into people's lives, and hear them saying, We have lost our father. All the dispossessed waking to the morning call. Sorrow, sorrow is this day.
The living fell upon the body and knocked it to the ground.
The living do not accept the fact that their father is dead. They want him back among them. He should be the last among them to die. They should be dead, not him.
The voice said, Distraught and chanting mourners.
The living beat themselves and bled. They ripped the funeral shroud and tried to take the dead man into their tide, their living wave, and reverse the course of time so that he lives.
Karen's hands were pressed to her face.
The living touched the body, they pressed the imam's flesh to keep him warm. They had bloody shirts and there were towels around the heads of many men, soaked with blood.
Karen felt she was among them. She saw the shrouded body on the litter surrounded by bearded men, black-clad mourners and revolutionary guards, and they were fighting to touch the imam and take pieces of his shroud.
She could see his thin white legs exposed to the light. They were fighting over the body and beating their own faces.
She thought of the delicate tending of the dead and watched the frenzy of this scene and believed she might pass out. It was an injury to the idea that the dead are protected. His delicate hands and legs were so unfairly exposed. The living paraded the body around the compound and there were soldiers firing shots and men with bloodied heads.
But they were only trying to bring him back among them.
The voice said, Eight people trampled to death and many thousands injured.
But it was the tale of a body now. It was beginning to be the story of a body that the living will not yield to the earth. They were passing out from heat and grief. There were people diving into the grave. She saw them throw themselves rag-bodied into the opening. Their bodies did not matter anymore and were limp and bent with grief. They wanted to occupy the grave to keep the imam out.
Karen went backwards into their lives, into the hovels and unpaved streets, and she watched the pictures on the screen.