Halfway through the tunnel he heard music. On the other side, close to where the shuttle trains were, stood a band, a typical subway assemblage of musicians, in this case of Peruvian Indians playing music from the Andes. The music reverberated through the narrow subterranean passage; he had heard the music before he had seen the five men performing on their charangos and mandolins and guitars and sikus. It sounded like high-altitude mountain music, harmonies and rhythms and chord changes conceived in the upper atmospheres and brought down to the metal and concrete below ground level. He approached the band. They had CDs for sale; the label said that their name was Ch’uwa Yacu. He even loved the sound of that, without having any idea of how to pronounce it. Saul felt himself drawn up into the music, absorbed by it, as he had been by the heat off the sidewalks. He tossed a five-dollar bill into the musicians’ open guitar case.
When he looked up, on the other side of the small crowd, wedged in near the back, he saw Gordy Himmelman behind what seemed to be a slight curtain of gauze, his eyes wide open and staring. Gordy, a hayseed ghost out of his element, was looking first at the musicians and then back at Saul, full in the face, and his mouth was gaping dark with distracted amazement. But of course it wasn’t Gordy. It was just anybody’s boy.
He was offering himself to me for adoption, Saul thought. He was a stray dog. That’s why he stood out there on the lawn. But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t take him.
Saul waited for a moment, and then it came: what he had been anticipating, the breaking-open, and, very quietly, so as not to disturb the other listeners, he unobtrusively boarded the shuttle to Times Square, his shoulders shaking. He didn’t know how long he sat there, once he got on, though he did remember to put on his dark glasses. Tears streamed quietly from under the lenses down his cheeks and onto his shirt. The shuttle took him to its destination, and then took him back to Grand Central, and then returned to Times Square. Everyone ignored him. They came and left, came and left. He simply lost track of the time as he was ferried from one place to the other.
Part Three
Thirteen
A squirrel squatted in the birdbath. Another squirrel was hanging by its claws onto the birdfeeder. The girl, looking out her bedroom window at the backyard, cleaned her fingernails halfheartedly with the nail file and thought of the end of the world, and then she wondered why, if there was a word “ruthless” that was often applied to enemies of the U.S.A., then what happened to its opposite, its lost positive, “ruth,” which would have to mean “kindness” but didn’t mean anything because no one used it? We had ruthless enemies but no ruthful friends.
If some people were “unruly,” then who was “ruly”? Nobody. When her room was messy, her mother said it was “unkempt,” but when it was clean, it was never “kempt” because the word didn’t exist. Disgruntled postal workers were everywhere. Where were the gruntled ones? Everybody had a word for the wrong thing, but silence prevailed for the right.
Early in the morning just after the sun was up, the squirrels looked like boys, somehow, she couldn’t say why. Maybe because of the way they moved, skittering and chasing each other, twitching. Or maybe it was the fur. Something.
Her name was Gina, she was sixteen years old, and it was Sunday, Family Day. After staring at the squirrels, she remembered to feed her guinea pig his breakfast food pellets. Wilbur squeaked and squealed softly as she dropped the pellets down the cage bars into the red plastic tray. It didn’t take much to make him happy.
On the other side of her room was a picture of Switzerland her mom had put up years ago. The picture had a lake in it, which was ruthlessly blue. Gina felt funny when she looked at this picture, so she didn’t look at it very often. She couldn’t take it down because her mom had given it to her.
Family Day. The plan was, her dad would show up and take them— her brother, her mom, herself — to the beach. Gina threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She grabbed her flute and went into the basement to practice for the school marching band, of which she was a member.
Ten minutes later she heard the thud of the morning newspaper flung against the front screen door. Gina put her flute on top of her dad’s workbench (he had never bothered to move it to his apartment after he moved out) and went upstairs to read the headlines. The news consisted of Iraq (bombs), Cuba (jails), Ireland (more bombs), and then there was something about Gordy Himmelman.
Gordy Himmelman! He had shot himself. To death. It was permanent. Why hadn’t anyone called her about it?
She had been in classes with Gordy Himmelman since kindergarten, but he was in a class by himself, and she hadn’t seen much of him since he’d dropped out. He muttered and swore and blew his nose on notebook paper, and he talked to himself in long strings of garble and never had any friends you could show in public. You could feel sorry for him, but he would never notice how sorry you felt, and he wouldn’t care. Pity was lost on him. It was a total waste of time. In third grade he had brought a pen-light battery into school and, standing next to the monkey bars, he had swallowed it during recess to attract attention to himself. The battery was only a double-A, but even so. He had black-and-blue marks all over him most days. His breath smelled of dill pickles that had gone unfresh. You couldn’t even talk to him about the weather because he never noticed it — it didn’t make any difference to him what the sky was doing or how it was doing it. He had this human-junkyard-don’t-mess-with-me look on his face and would kick anyone who got in his way, though he did have one comic routine: slugging himself in the face so hard that his head jerked backward. He had bicycled to that teacher, Mr. Bernstein’s house, where he had blown his brains out in the yard, in front of a tree, in the morning, a matinee suicide. On the front page of the paper was a picture of the tree. It was a color picture, and you could sort of see the blood if you looked closely.
There hadn’t been a suicide note. A suicide note would have been like a writing assignment. Way too hard. He would have had to get his aunt to write it for him.
Gina felt something stirring inside her. She was kind of interested in death. Gordy was the first person she’d ever known who had entered it. He had gone from being Mr. Nothing to being Mr. Something Else: a temporarily interesting person. She sat at the kitchen counter eating her strawberry Pop-Tart, wondering whether Gordy was lying on a bed surrounded by virgins, or eternal fire, or what.
It was sort of cool, him doing that. Maybe the smartest thing he’d ever done. Adventuresome and courageous.
If you didn’t have a life, maybe you got one by being dead.
Her dad was late. Finally he showed up at eleven-thirty in his red Durango, saying, “Ha ha, I’m late.” He and Gina’s mom were divorced, but they were still “friends,” and her dad had never really committed himself to the divorce, in Gina’s opinion. He was halfhearted about it, a romantic sad sack. They had cooked up this Family Day scheme two years ago. Every weekend he’d come to pick up Gina and Bertie, her little brother, and their mom — Gina envied most divorced kids who went from their moms to their dads, without the cheesiness of Family Day — and then they’d do bowling-type activities for the sake of togetherness and friendliness, which of course was a total fraud, since they weren’t together or friendly at all. Usually Saturday was Family Day but sometimes Sunday was. Today they were going to the beach. Wild excitement. She had meant to bring a magazine.