“Yo, Larry. Lids!”
“Moe, did you ever think that time is something that doesn’t really exist, that it’s something we impose on the universe?” he said, still not turning around, continuing to rock and stare.
“Not really, Larry. I can see myself grow, watch my parents get older, watch things rust away. So how can time not exist?”
“What if things aren’t linear in the way you just described them? What if the universe is a solid block of events that occur all at once? Maybe everything that ever happened is happening, and everything that ever will happen has already happened. Maybe it’s like a film with all the frames compressed together. We might only experience it one frame at a time, one slice at a time. Maybe time is merely experiential in nature.”
“Are you tripping or theorizing now?”
“The latter,” he said, finally turning to face me. “How’s your old lady?”
“Mindy? She’s pretty much the same. She opened her eyes this morning, but apparently Dr. Mengele doesn’t think it’s significant.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah. So I wanted to thank you for getting that guy to call me. What’d it cost you?”
His eyes drifted back to the window. “Forget it. Anything for you, Moe. Did his information help?”
“Yes and no.”
That got his full attention. “What does that mean?”
“It means his information left me with a lot more questions than answers. I think I need to have another talk with that guy, face to face.”
That set off his nervous ticcing. Larry’s head jerked slightly every few seconds and his eyelids fluttered. He touched every fingertip on his left hand to the tip of his left thumb and then reversed the order: index, middle, ring, pinky, pinky, ring, middle, index, index …
“Easy, Larry, easy. It’s no big thing. I just wanna talk to the guy.”
My words had no effect on him. His ticcing just got worse.
“The guy who attacked Mindy is dead!” I shouted at him, hoping his parents wouldn’t hear. “The guy with the pink blotches is dead.”
His left hand stilled. His eyelids opened wide. “Vitiligo,” he said. “I told you, those skin discolorations are vitiligo. He’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
“How? Did you — ”
I cut him off. “Do you have today’s paper?”
“On the kitchen table. My dad reads all of them every day.”
“Go get ’em.”
A minute later, I was showing him the stories about the fire. Like I said, I only had one source for information: Larry. I couldn’t afford to lose him, so I made the decision to tell him everything … well, almost everything. I sort of neglected to mention Bobby Friedman showing up with a set of keys. And maybe I pretended not to know the identity of the girl who’d dropped by to remove inventory from the second floor store room, the girl who’d torched the place. Other than that, I laid it all out for him.
When I was done, I made my pitch. “So you see why I gotta talk to the guy who got me that address in the first place, right?”
But Larry wasn’t there yet. “The body.”
“What about it?”
“Were you scared?”
“Really scared, but I held it together for a little while.”
“I’m not very brave, Moe. I wish I was, but I’m not. I’m never going to make it in this world. I grew up in this room, and I’m going to die in this room. It’s the only place in the world where I feel safe. When I was at MIT, I was scared all the time. It used to take every ounce of strength I had to get out of bed there. I think I knew even before I went there that I wouldn’t make it.”
“But you deal drugs, Larry. Doesn’t that scare you? Aren’t you worried about Rikers or the Brooklyn Tombs?”
He answered me with a smile, a smile as sad as a chick shoved out of its nest. “I’ll arrange for you to meet him, Moe. I’ll call you later.” With that, he turned back to the window.
I didn’t need to look to see that he was rocking. I could hear the legs of his too-small chair creaking.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Privacy was about all the boardwalk had to offer when the temperatures dipped below freezing and the winds off the Atlantic scoured your exposed skin with grains of sand from the long miles of empty ocean beaches. In spite of the frigid air and biting winds, the throttle on my senses was full out. Tripping was a little bit like this, and that’s what people who had never dropped acid didn’t get. It doesn’t so much fuck with your mind as it removes all your filters. Suddenly, it’s like all the instruments in the orchestra are playing all at once, loudly, and as fast as they can. So it was as I walked down from the handball courts toward the midway. The clank and squeals of the elevated subway echoed through the brick canyons, and the sea’s low roar was constant and undramatic. It was almost as if the ocean understood drama wasn’t worth its while with no one on the beach to be impressed. The salt air carried with it the unpleasant grace notes of the raw sewage from the plant around the bend beyond Sea Gate. The arthritic wood beams and sea-ravaged metal bones of the dormant rides moaned about their sad decay, about having to bear the sneering, taunting wind that whistled through their old bones.
By the time I got to the bench in front of the Parachute Jump, I sympathized with the rides. Even my young bones were stiff with cold. My collection of bruises didn’t help. I checked my Bulova and saw that I was a few minutes early. I was always early. In my family, if you were five minutes early, you were ten minutes late. The Pragers were never tastefully late to a party. The phrase had no meaning for us. Don’t misunderstand; our promptness wasn’t so much out of good manners as gnawing insecurity. Aaron, Miriam, and I were raised with a sense of dread, living in the fear of missing something. What that something was, I couldn’t say. I think my parents felt cheated by their lives somehow. That if they had only been more vigilant, had slept with one eye open, had just gotten to where they were going a few seconds earlier, they would have escaped the trap life had set for them.
I turned and looked up at the looming superstructure of the Parachute Jump, Coney Island’s central icon and, from now on, its quintessential symbol of impotence. For although it was scheduled to open again in the spring, the rumor was it would be its last season. At least they wouldn’t be tearing the damn thing down with the rest of Steeplechase Park. No, this was Brooklyn. We liked our scars. We wore our failures with pride. We lived in a world of what used to be, and what would be no more. Too bad they had bulldozed Ebbets Field. They should have packed it up brick by brick and rebuilt it in Coney Island at the foot of the Jump. Two follies, side by side: a parachute jump with no parachutes, a baseball stadium with no team. Greek tragedy? Nah, a freak show. We always did like our freak shows in Coney Island.
“Hey, you Moe? You Moe?” a raspy whisper cut through the wind.
I tilted my head back to earth and saw him standing there. To call him thin would have been high understatement. He was positively skeletal. If he hadn’t been as tall as I was, he might’ve been able to shop in the boys’ department at John’s Bargain Store. Maybe it was the lighting, but his skin had a yellow quality to it. When I noticed his beak-like nose running and caught a glimpse of the lit cigarette he held between his fidgety fingers, I decided the sickly shade of his skin wasn’t a trick of the light. If it was possible, this guy was even more fidgety than Lids. He moved so much he would have made a hummingbird cross-eyed. But unlike Lids, this guy needed a drink or a joint, not shock therapy. His gesticulations aside, it didn’t take a genius to see he was nervous about being here and that he’d rather be somewhere else, anywhere else. Still, Lids had gotten him to show up.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m Moe. And you are …?”
“Sick, man. I’m sick.”
I was slow on the uptake. “I’m sorry to hear it, but I was asking for your name.”