ESMERALDA LOPEZ
12 YEAR
PETECTED IN HEVEN
They all met on the third floor and Gracie paced the hollow room. Ismael stood in a corner smoking a Phillies Blunt. The nun did not seem to know where to begin, how to address the nameless thing that someone had done to this child she’d so hoped to save. She paced, she clenched her fists. They heard the gassy moan of a city bus some blocks away.
“Ismael. You have to find out who this guy is that did this thing.”
“You think I’m running here? El Lay Pee Dee?”
“You have contacts in the neighborhood that no one else has.”
“What neighborhood? The neighborhood’s over there. This here’s the Bird. It’s all I can do to get these kids so they spell a word on the freaking wall. When I was writing we did subway cars in the dark without a letter misspell.”
“Who cares about spelling?” Gracie said.
Ismael exchanged a secret look with Sister Edgar, giving her a snaggle smile from out of his history of dental neglect. She felt weak and lost. Now that Terror has become local, how do we live? she thought. The great thrown shadow dismantled — no longer a launched object in the sky named for a Greek goddess on a bell krater in 500 BC. What is Terror now? Some noise on the pavement very near, a thief with a paring knife or the stammer of casual rounds from a passing car. Someone who carries off your child. Ancient fears called back, they will steal my child, they will come into my house when I’m asleep and cut out my heart because they have a dialogue with Satan. She let Gracie carry her grief and fatigue for the rest of that day and the day after and the two or three weeks after that. Edgar thought she might fall into crisis, begin to see the world as a spurt of blank matter that chanced to make an emerald planet here and a dead star there, with random waste between. The serenity of immense design was missing from her sleep, form and proportion, the power that awes and thrills. When Gracie and the crew took food into the projects, Edgar waited in the van, she was the nun in the van, unable to face the people who needed reasons for Esmeralda.
Mother of Mercy pray for us. Three hundred days.
Then the stories began, word passing block to block, moving through churches and superettes, maybe garbled slightly, mistranslated here and there, but not deeply distorted — it was clear enough that people were talking about the same uncanny occurrence. And some of them went and looked and told others, stirring the hope that grows on surpassing things.
They gathered after dusk at a windy place between bridge approaches, seven or eight people drawn by the word of one or two, then thirty people drawn by the seven, then a tight silent crowd that grew bigger but no less respectful, two hundred people wedged onto a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx where the expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards stretch toward the narrows, all that industrial desolation that breaks your heart with its fretful Depression beauty — the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in persistent wind.
Wedged, they came and parked their cars if they had cars, six or seven to a car, parking tilted on a high shoulder or in the factory side streets, and they wedged themselves onto the concrete island between the expressway and the pocked boulevard, feeling the wind come chilling in and gazing above the wash of madcap traffic to a billboard floating in the gloom — an advertising sign scaffolded high above the riverbank and meant to attract the doped-over glances of commuters on the trains that ran incessantly down from the northern suburbs into the thick of Manhattan money and glut.
Edgar sat across from Gracie in the refectory. She ate her food without tasting it because she’d decided years ago that taste was not the point. The point was to clean the plate.
Gracie said, “No, please, you can’t.”
“Just to see.”
“No, no, no, no.”
“I want to see for myself.”
“This is tabloid. This is the worst kind of tabloid superstition. It’s horrible. A complete, what is it? A complete abdication, you know? Be sensible. Don’t abdicate your good sense.”
“It could be her they’re seeing.”
“You know what this is? It’s the nightly news. It’s the local news at eleven with all the grotesque items neatly spaced to keep you watching the whole half hour.”
“I think I have to go,” Edgar said.
“This is something for poor people to confront and judge and understand if they can and we have to see it in that framework. The poor need visions, okay?”
“I believe you are patronizing the people you love,” Edgar said softly.
“That’s not fair.”
“You say the poor. But who else would saints appear to? Do saints and angels appear to bank presidents? Eat your carrots.”
“It’s the nightly news. It’s gross exploitation of a child’s horrible murder.”
“But who is exploiting? No one’s exploiting,” Edgar said. “People go there to weep, to believe.”
“It’s how the news becomes so powerful it doesn’t need TV or newspapers. It exists in people’s perceptions. It becomes real or fake-real so people think they’re seeing reality when they’re seeing something they invent. It’s the news without the media.”
Edgar ate her bread.
“I’m older than the pope. I never thought I would live long enough to be older than a pope and I think I need to see this thing.”
“Pictures lie,” Gracie said.
“I think I need to see it.”
“Don’t pray to pictures, pray to saints.”
“I think I need to go.”
“But you can’t. It’s crazy. Don’t go, Sister.”
But Edgar went. She went with a shy quiet type named Janis Loudermilk, who wore a retainer for spacey teeth. They took the bus and subway and walked the last three blocks and Sister Jan carried a portable phone in case they needed aid.
A madder orange moon hung over the city.
People in the glare of passing cars, hundreds clustered on the island, their own cars parked cockeyed and biaswise, dangerously near the streaming traffic. The nuns dashed across the boulevard and squeezed onto the island and people made room for them, pressed bodies apart to let them stand at ease.
They followed the crowd’s stoked gaze. They stood and looked. The billboard was unevenly lighted, dim in spots, several bulbs blown and unreplaced, but the central elements were clear, a vast cascade of orange juice pouring diagonally from top right into a goblet that was handheld at lower left — the perfectly formed hand of a female Caucasian of the middle suburbs. Distant willows and a vaguish lake view set the social locus. But it was the juice that commanded the eye, thick and pulpy with a ruddled flush that matched the madder moon. And the first detailed drops plashing at the bottom of the goblet with a scatter of spindrift, each fleck embellished like the figurations of a precisionist epic. What a lavishment of effort and technique, no refinement spared — the equivalent, Edgar thought, of medieval church architecture.
And the six-ounce cans of Minute Maid arrayed across the bottom of the board, a hundred identical cans so familiar in design and color and typeface that they had personality, the convivial cuteness of little orange people.