But he could see, out of the corner of his eye, his horrid reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He looked down at Kate’s hands, the blood smeared across her palms. And he saw the restaurant-goers and the waiters and waitresses and busboys, who, not knowing what to make of the bleeding and the crying and the broken lilies arcing over Jim’s and Kate’s heads like some insane wedding canopy, had come from the kitchen or the bar to stand mutely around them. The pain in his body grew, and the words that spilled out of him were not words of love. Or they were. He spoke to his wife, as he spoke to the people gathered.
“Don’t you see, Kate? Don’t you see? It’s time for me to go. I can’t do this anymore. I have no place here. I don’t belong. I hurt so. You can live and be happy. That will never be true for me.”
“No, no, baby,” she wept at him.
Someone touched his arm. It was Elliot, who’d come up behind him. He said to Jim, “Let’s get in the car.”
Lorenzo was there, too. Kate said to Jim, “Honey, let Lorenzo take the flowers. Just for now,” and he did.
A moment later, Lorenzo came back with a wet cloth. Kate used it to wipe her eyes and to clean Jim’s face and her hands. She tied the belt around his overcoat. She said, “There.”
They went out of the restaurant, the four of them. Susan let Jim lean on her, and Elliot steadied Kate. On the way out the door, they heard Lorenzo, behind them, telling his patrons, “Everything is all right. Our friend has had a bad time. Please, let me buy everyone a drink.”
On Broadway, the wind had died, and the air seemed to have warmed. They walked out into new snow. And, wouldn’t you know, Jim did wrap his arm around Susan’s shoulders, and Elliot ducked down close to Kate, listening to her mumble whatever it was she had to say to him.
At the garage, Jim and Kate got into the back seat of Elliot’s car. Susan sat beside Elliot. Elliot started the engine, turned on the headlights and the windshield wipers. Thump, thump, thump. He steered east. During the trip, Jim took his belt from around his waist. He gave Kate his scarf and his phone and his keys and all his money, which amounted to about thirty dollars.
Later, she would get on her knees on the emergency-room floor and extract the laces from his shoes. A nurse would come, then another, and a doctor promising sleeping pills.
By that time, after midnight, Elliot and Susan would have driven up the FDR Drive and out of Manhattan, through the Bronx, and into Westchester County.
“You can go home now, if you’d like,” the doctor said to Kate. “We won’t let anything happen to him.”
He gave Kate a plastic garbage bag, into which she put Jim’s overcoat and his suit jacket. She would use the last of his money for her crosstown taxi, and for milk and cereal at the Korean market near the apartment.
In the deep of the night, they came for him. A male nurse helped him into a wheelchair, and then pushed him through the white labyrinth of hallways and waited for the elevator.
Margaret, one of the night nurses, met him on the ward. She said, “Hello, Mr. Davis. You’re back with us again, I see.” She asked, “Do you think you can walk?” She gave him Ativan and a paper cup of water, and watched while he swallowed. Then she showed him to a room of his own.
MEET THE PRESIDENT! by Zadie Smith
“What you got there, then?”
The boy didn’t hear the question. He stood at the end of a ruined pier, believing himself quite alone.
But now he registered the presence at his back, and turned. “What you got there?”
A very old person, a woman, stood before him, gripping the narrow shoulder of a girl child. Both of them local, typically stunted, dim: they stared up at him stupidly. The boy turned again to the sea. All week long he had been hoping for a clear day to try out the new technology — not new to the world, but new to the boy — and now at last here was a break in the rain. Gray sky met gray sea. Not ideal, but sufficient. Ideally he would be standing on a cairn in Scotland or some other tropical spot, experiencing backlit clarity. Ideally he would be—
“Is it one of them what you see through?”
A hand, lousy with blue veins, reached out for the light encircling the boy’s head, as if it were a substantial thing, to be grasped like the handle of a mug.
“Ooh, look at the green, Aggie. That shows you it’s on.”
The boy was ready to play. He touched the node on his finger to the node at his temple, raising the volume.
“Course, he’d have to be somebody, Aggs, cos they don’t give ’em to nobody”—the boy felt the shocking touch of a hand on his own flesh. “Are you somebody, then?”
She had shuffled around until she stood square in front of him, unavoidable. Hair as white as paper. A long, shapeless black dress, made of some kind of cloth, and what appeared to be a pair of actual glasses. Forty-nine years old, type O, a likelihood of ovarian cancer, some ancient debt infraction — nothing more. A blank, more or less. Same went for the girclass="underline" never left the country, 85 percent chance of macular degeneration, an uncle on the database, long ago located, eliminated. She would be nine in two days. Melinda Durham and Agatha Hanwell. They shared no more DNA than strangers.
“Can you see us?” The old woman let go of her charge and waved her hands wildly. The tips of her fingers barely reached the top of the boy’s head. “Are we in it? What are we?”
The boy, unused to proximity, took a single step forward. Farther he could not go. Beyond was the ocean; above, a mess of weather, clouds closing in on blue wherever blue tried to assert itself. A dozen or so craft darted up and down, diving low like seabirds after a fish, and no bigger than seabirds, skimming the dirty foam, then returning to the heavens, directed by unseen hands. On his first day here the boy had trailed his father on an inspection tour to meet those hands: intent young men at their monitors, over whose shoulders the boy’s father leaned, as he sometimes leaned over the boy to ensure he ate breakfast.
“What d’you call one of them there?”
The boy tucked his shirt in all round: “AG 12.”
The old woman snorted as a mark of satisfaction, but did not leave.
He tried looking the females directly in their dull brown eyes. It was what his mother would have done, a kindly woman with a great mass of waist-length flame-colored hair, famed for her patience with locals. But his mother was long dead, he had never known her, he was losing what little light the day afforded. He blinked twice, said, “Hand to hand.” Then, having a change of heart: “Weaponry.” He looked down at his torso, to which he now attached a quantity of guns.
“You carry on, lad,” the old woman said. “We won’t get in your way. He can see it all, duck,” she told the girl, who paid her no mind. “Got something in his hands — or thinks he does.”
She took a packet of tobacco from a deep pocket in the front of her garment and began to roll a cigarette, using the girl as a shield from the wind.
“Them clouds, dark as bulls. Racing, racing. They always win.” To illustrate, she tried turning Aggie’s eyes to the sky, lifting the child’s chin with a finger, but the girl would only gawk stubbornly at the woman’s elbow. “They’ll dump on us before we even get there. If you didn’t have to, I wouldn’t go, Aggie, no chance, not in this. It’s for you I do it. I’ve been wet and wet and wet. All my life. And I bet he’s looking at blazing suns and people in their what-have-yous and all togethers! Int yer? Course you are! And who’d blame you?” She laughed so loud the boy heard her. And then the child — who did not laugh, whose pale face, with its triangle chin and enormous, fair-lashed eyes, seemed capable only of astonishment — pulled at his actual leg, forcing him to mute for a moment and listen to her question.