All sounds gathered in the dimming sky.
She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war. Emergency vehicles were massing about a block and a half away. She saw workers pry open subway gratings in billows of pale smoke and she said a fast prayer, an act of hope, three years’ indulgence. Then heads and torsos began to emerge, indistinctly, people coming into the air with jaws skewed open in frantic gasps. A short circuit, a subway fire. Through the rearview mirror she spotted tourists getting off the bus and edging along the street, poised to take pictures. And the schoolkids going by, barely interested — they saw tapes of actual killings on TV. But what did she know, an old woman who ate fish on Friday and longed for the Latin mass? She was far less worthy than Sister Grace. Gracie was a soldier, a fighter for human worth. Edgar was basically a junior G-man, protecting a set of laws and prohibitions. She heard the yammer of police cars pulsing in stalled traffic and saw a hundred subway riders come out of the tunnels accompanied by workers in incandescent vests and she watched the tourists snapping pictures and thought of the trip she’d made to Rome many years ago, for study and spiritual renewal, and she’d swayed beneath the great domes and prowled the catacombs and church basements and this is what she thought as the riders came up to the street, how she’d stood in a subterranean chapel in a Capuchin church and could not take her eyes off the skeletons stacked there, wondering about the monks whose flesh had once decorated these metatarsals and femurs and skulls, many skulls heaped in alcoves and catty-corners, and she remembered thinking vindictively that these are the dead who will come out of the earth to lash and cudgel the living, to punish the sins of the living — death, yes, triumphant — but does she really want to believe that, still?
Gracie edged into the driver’s seat, unhappy and flushed.
“Nearly caught her. We ran into the thickest part of the lots and then I was distracted, damn scared actually, because bats, I couldn’t believe it, actual bats — like the only flying mammals on earth?” She made ironic wing motions with her fingers. “They came swirling up out of a crater filled with medical waste. Bandages smeared with body fluids.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Edgar said.
“I saw, like, enough used syringes to satisfy the death wish of entire cities. Dead white mice by the hundreds with stiff flat bodies. You could flip them like baseball cards.”
Edgar stretched her fingers inside the milky gloves.
“And Esmeralda somewhere in those shrubs and junked cars. I’ll bet anything she’s living in a car,” Gracie said. “What happened here? Subway fire, looks like.”
“Yes.”
“Any dead?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I wish I’d caught her.”
“She’ll be all right,” Edgar said.
“She won’t be all right.”
“She can take care of herself. She knows the landscape. She’s smart.”
“Sooner or later,” Gracie said.
“She’s safe. She’s smart. She’ll be all right.”
And that night, under the first tier of scratchy sleep, Edgar saw the subway riders once again, adult males, females of childbearing age, all rescued from the smoky tunnels, groping along catwalks and led up companion ladders to the street — fathers and mothers, the lost parents found and gathered, shirt-plucked and bodied up, guided to the surface by small faceless figures with Day-Glo wings.
And some weeks later Edgar and Grace made their way on foot across a patch of leaf rot to the banks of the Bronx River near the city limits where a rear-ended Honda sat discarded in underbrush, plates gone, tires gone, windows lifted cleanly, rats ascratch in the glove compartment, and after they noted the particulars of abandonment and got back in the van, Edgar had an awful feeling, one of those forebodings from years long past when she sensed dire things about a pupil or a parent or another nun and felt stirrings of information in the dusty corridors of the convent or the school’s supply room that smelled of pencil wood and composition books or the church that abutted the school, some dark knowledge in the smoke that floated from the altar boy’s swinging censer, because things used to come to her in the creak of old floorboards and the odor of clothes, other people’s damp camel coats, because she drew News and Rumors and Catastrophes into the spotless cotton pores of her habit and veil.
Not that she claimed the power to live without doubt.
She doubted and she cleaned. That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned every bristle of the scrub brush with steel wool drenched in disinfectant. But this meant she had to immerse the bottle of disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant. And she hadn’t done this. She hadn’t done it because the regression was infinite. And the regression was infinite because it is called infinite regression. You see how doubt becomes a disease that spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves.
And another morning a day later. She sat in the van and watched Sister Grace emerge from the convent, the rolling gait, the short legs and squarish body, Gracie’s face averted as she edged around the front of the vehicle and opened the door on the driver’s side.
She got in and gripped the wheel, looking straight ahead.
“I got a call from the friary.”
Then she reached for the door and shut it. She gripped the wheel again.
“Somebody raped Esmeralda and threw her off a roof.”
She started the engine.
“I’m sitting here thinking, Who do I kill?”
She looked at Edgar briefly, then put the van in gear.
“Because who do I kill is the only question I can ask myself without falling apart completely.”
They drove south through local streets, the tenement brick smoked mellow in the morning light. Edgar felt the weather of Gracie’s rage and pain — she’d approached the girl two or three times in recent weeks, had talked to her from a distance, thrown a bag of clothing into the pokeweed where Esmeralda stood. They rode all the way in silence with the older nun mind-reciting questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism. The strength of these exercises, which were a form of perdurable prayer, lay in the voices that accompanied hers, children responding through the decades, syllable-crisp, a panpipe chant that was the lucid music of her life. Question and answer. What deeper dialogue might right minds devise? She reached her hand across to Gracie’s on the wheel and kept it there for a digital tick on the dashboard clock. Who made us? God made us. Those clear-eyed faces so believing. Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things. She felt tired in her arms, her arms were heavy and dead and she got all the way to Lesson 12 when the projects appeared at the rim of the sky, upper windows white with sunplay against the broad dark face of beaten stone.
When Gracie finally spoke she said, “It’s still there.”
“What’s still there?”
“Hear it, hear it?”
“Hear what?” Edgar said.
“Ku-ku-ku-ku.”
Then she drove the van down past the projects toward the painted wall.
When they got there the angel was already sprayed in place. They gave her a pink sweatshirt and pink and aqua pants and a pair of white Air Jordans with the logo prominent — she was a running fool, so Ismael gave her running shoes. And the little kid named Juano still dangled from a rope, winched down from the roof by the old hand-powered hoist they used to grapple cars onto the deck of the truck. Ismael and others bent over the ledge, attempting to shout correct spellings down to him as he drifted to and from the wall, leaning in to spray the interlaced letters that marked the great gone era of wildstyle graffiti. The nuns stood outside the van, watching the kid finish the last scanted word and then saw him yanked skyward in the cutting wind.