"That's the lamest story I ever heard," said the governor's daughter.
"Totally," said one of the others.
"Why should we believe you? Do you have proof?"
"Proof?"
"I don't think he has proof."
"It's my knife," I said. "My father won it in cathouse in El Paso."
"A cathouse?" said the first girl, though we knew then to say woman, even if none of us were women or men.
"Is that the word he used?" said another. "Cathouse? Not rape factory? What a pig your father must be. Are you proud of him? Paying to rape underage women of color?"
"They have agency," said the governor's daughter to the first girl. "They are sex workers in a marginal economy and there is agency there. Though not much. Especially if they are underage."
"Who said underage?" I said, tried to recruit Constance to my cause with a glance, but she glided behind the others. Somehow I couldn't blame her.
"Okay, maybe they were eighteen," said the governor's daughter. "Who cares? It's a bullshit story. It's not your knife. And anyway, possession is nine-tenths of the law."
I wondered when she had first heard that sacred charm. Had the governor cooed it into her newborn ear? I could not believe I was not believed. I wanted to laugh. I could just walk out with the knife, nobody would stop me, but still I would not be believed. I would be known as a thief.
I shook as I handed over my father's knife. Such shame. The governor's daughter, who cared so little for this object, would get to keep it. She was from the people who kept everything. I was from the people who rented some of everything for brief amounts of time. I knew I deserved no pity, would get none from the people who kept everything. They only pitied the people with nothing at all. I also knew that because I was leaving without the knife, I did not deserve the knife. A part of me did not want to deserve it.
Brownsville or El Paso.
Wave or brandish.
So it was all very tricky, telling the truth. It wasn't really about the truth. It was about being believed. It was about Purdy believing that he'd chosen right when he'd chosen me. It was bad form to hound him by telephone this soon after the email. I surfed art blogs for news of newer art blogs, food blogs for news of food. A new joint downtown seated eleven. The pork belly tart was divine. Reservations were impossible, and if you got one, it didn't guarantee dinner for your party, just you.
I logged off, swung my knapsack to my shoulder. I'd had a hard time deciding whether to carry a knapsack, a messenger bag, a canvas book bag, or a briefcase. Each seemed to embody a particular kind of confusion and loss. But the knapsack did the least spinal damage. I'd also noticed more people on the street with those briefcases on wheels. Nothing depressed me more than these rigs, this luggage for people not going anywhere, having their holiday at work. Sometimes I imagined those squat cases full of bondage gear or hobby trains, some secret glee, but you could almost be certain they bulged with files.
"Tough hour?" said Horace, swiveled from his monitor.
"Just sort of setting up today. Need to pick up Bernie soon."
"Right. Well, nice to have you back. On a probationary basis."
"Thanks, Horace."
Vargina popped her head up out of her command nook.
"Milo?"
"Hey," I said.
"So, everything working here?"
"Think so, yeah."
"You know, given the nature of your situation here, how it's just this one project, please don't feel you have to come in that often. We're more interested in the outcome than the process."
"Right," I said. "But since, if this works out, I'll be back here long-term, isn't it better if I re-integrate now?"
There was a blankness, and within that blankness an odd flicker of what I took to be pity, in Vargina's expression. The pity part, plus the idea that the tips of her nipples might be brushing the synthetic weave of the cube wall, put a thrum in me. Or it might have been my cell phone.
Eight
They held up the N train at Queensboro Plaza for a medical emergency, somebody maybe stroked out on the car's sticky floor, mistaking for a celestial communique the guarantees of Upper Manhattan's number one pimple doctor, or the public service announcement about condoms targeted at Spanish-speaking men who believed they were not gay. The victim's eyes might even have alighted on the new Mediocre subway campaign: Knowledge and Discovery: A Better You. A Better World, the words stenciled below a beautiful Polish exchange student in a lab coat. This could be what the admissions folks called a change-of-life opportunity. If Strokey lived he might quit his job, go back to school, become what he always wanted to be, namely, somebody standing next to a beautiful Polish exchange student in a lab coat.
Still, why stop the whole train just so paramedics could board the car and pull some poor slob back from the white light? We couldn't waste time like this. Not for an individual life. We were losing our superpower superpowers. Would they stop this train in China?
I got off and waved down a livery cab, rode out to my Astoria Boulevard stop, took the shortcut through a playground beneath the tracks. The playground was empty except for a burly man coaxing his daughter down a slide. The sight of them startled me. He looked like a man I'd known on my block, a man who was dead now but who in life boasted the same huge shoulders and shaggy dreadlocks. But really this man looked very different, his skin much lighter, and he wore jeans and construction boots powdered with drywall dust. The man I remembered favored tatty T-shirts and checkered chef pants. Whenever I thought of him I thought of those pants.
Often, out with Bernie in the stroller, I'd pass his house. His two young kids, a boy and a girl, would putter around a dirty plastic playhouse, the man on his stoop, smoking, reading the paper. I'd wave, dad to dad. Sometimes we would talk, the weather, the fish at the Greek place up the street, the dilapidation of the swings at the river park.
I liked talking to this man who could somehow pull off the role of loving and attentive parent with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He was a throwback papa, reminiscent of another time, another texture, his affection gruff, or else a bit reined in, but all the more palpable, that full-hearted but fatalistic love from before people used "parent" as a verb, when you might sit on the stoop and watch your children play in your barren rented yard and believe that life could work out. It was horseshit, of course, nostalgia for a nonexistent past, but it warmed the cheap parts of me.
Yet we were also, the both of us in our way, the new dads. This fellow was the real McCoy, a stay-at-home hero, but at least I was a quality-of-lifer, a knock-off-at-fiver, who would rush back for hours of child care if Maura needed to finish a project or just needed free time, a pedicure, a treadmill run. Often enough this man and I both put our kids to bed, our wives still at work, doing the work of their type in this era, the conferencing, the teleconferencing, the brainstorming, the liaisoning. Sometimes the work of their type meant drinks at the bar with other men and women. Sometimes they just needed to get away from us. Enjoy yourself, we said. Heaven knows you deserve it. We meant this and did not resent them for being better than us. New dads still respected what was best in the old ones, but had maybe abandoned the fear, the silence, or else the gabby cruelty of our fathers, grandfathers.
This is how I liked to think of us, anyway, me and this large man with his good laugh and the Marlboro Light in his teeth or between his stubby fingers, which he'd hold with such care away from his daughter's braids when she charged over to collapse in his lap and file howling grievance against her brother's style of playhouse play.
I even imagined a life for this guy, figured him for a chef, because of the checkered pants, home until he could find another high-end organic gig or else raise the cash for his own place, living off scant savings and his wife's administrative job. Then one afternoon, sitting in the playground I crossed now, while Bernie napped in his stroller, I noticed an item in the paper about an entire family wiped out by a beverage truck on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and studying the article and the photograph of my neighbor there beneath photographs (and diagram) of the wreck, I saw I had not been far off.