“You’re in a moment, Susan,” he said. “You’ll get over it.”
“No, I won’t get over it.” Raphael burped onto Elijah. “I’ll never get over it, and you will not fucking tell me that I will.”
“Please stop shouting,” he said, ostentatiously calm.
“This is not your territory. This is my territory, and you can’t have it.”
“Are we going to argue about metaphors? Because that’s the wrong metaphor.”
“We aren’t going to argue about anything. Put him down. Put him into the crib.”
Elijah stood for a few seconds, and then with painfully executed elaboration he lowered Raphael into the crib and pulled over him the blue blanket that Elijah’s mother had made for the baby. He started up the music box and turned around. Both his hands were tightened into fists.
“I’m going out,” he said. “I’ve got to go out right now.”
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was gone.
She went downstairs and turned on the TV. On the screen—she kept the sound muted because she didn’t really want to get attached to the story—a man with an eagle tattoo on his forearm aimed a gun at a distant figure of indistinct gender. The man fired, whereupon the distant figure fell. The screen cut to a brightly lit room where male authority figures of some kind were jotting down notes and answering landline telephones while they held cups of coffee. Perhaps, she thought, this was an old movie. One woman, probably a cop, heard something on the phone and reacted with alarm. Then she shouted at the others in the room, and their shocked faces were instantly replaced by a soap commercial showing a cartoon rhinoceros in a bubble bath set upon by a trickster monkey, and this commercial was then replaced by another one, with grinning skydivers falling together in a geometrical pattern advertising an insurance company, and then the local newscaster came on with a tease for the ten o’clock news, followed by a commercial for a multinational petroleum operation apparently dedicated to cleaning up the environment and saving baby seals, and Susan scratched her foot, and she was looking at the no-longer-distant figure (a young woman, as it turned out) on an autopsy table as a medical examiner pointed at a bullet hole in the victim’s rib-cage area—tantalizingly close to her breasts, which were demurely covered, though the handheld camera seemed eager to see them—and Susan felt her eyes getting heavy, and then another, older woman was hit by a tram in Prague, which was how Susan knew she was dreaming. Sleeping, she wondered when Elijah would return. She wondered, for a moment, where her husband had gone.
When she woke up, Elijah stood before her, bleeding from the side of his mouth, a bruise starting to form just under his left eye. His knuckles were caked and bloody. On his face was an expression of joyful defiance. He was blocking the TV set. It was as if he had come out of it somehow.
She stood up and reached toward him. “You’re bleeding.”
He brushed her hand away. “Let me bleed.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me. Let me bleed.” He was smilingly jubilant. The smile looked like one of the smiles on the faces of the angels in the Loreto chapel.
“What happened to you?” she asked. “You got into a fight. My God. We need to put some ice or something on that.” She tried to reach for him again, and again he moved away from her.
“Leave me alone. Listen,” he said, straightening up, “you want to know what happened? This is what happened. I was angry at you, and I started walking, and I ended up in Alta Plaza Park. I walked in there, you know, where it was dark? Off those steep stairs on Clay Street? And this is the thing. I wanted to kill somebody. That’s kind of a new emotion for me, wanting to kill somebody. I mean, I wasn’t looking for someone to kill, but that’s what I was thinking. I’m just trying to be honest here. So I went up the stairs and found myself at the top, with the view, with the famous view of the city.
“Everybody admires the view, and I looked off into the darkness and thought I heard a scream, somewhere off there in the distance, and so, you know, I went toward it, toward the scream, the way anybody would. So I made my way off into the shadows, and what I saw was this other thing.”
“This thing?”
“Yeah, that’s right. This other thing. These two guys were beating up this girl, tearing her clothes, and then they had her down, one of them was holding her down, and the other one was, you know, lowering his jeans. No one else was around. So I went in.
“I wasn’t even thinking. I went in and grabbed the guy who was holding her down, and I slugged him. The other one, he got up and punched me in the kidneys. The woman, I think she stood up. No, I know she stood up because she said something in Spanish, and she ran away. I was fighting these guys, and she took off. She didn’t stay. I know she ran because when I hit the guy who was behind me with my elbow, I saw her running away, and I saw that she was barefoot.”
“This was in Alta Plaza Park?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s in Pacific Heights. They don’t usually have crime over there.”
“Well, they did tonight. I was fighting with those guys, and I finally landed a good one, on the first guy, and I broke his jaw. I heard it break. That was when they took off. The second guy took off, and the one with the broken jaw was groaning and went after him. No honor among thieves.” He smiled. “Goddamn, I feel great.”
She lifted his hand and touched the knuckles where scabs were forming. “So you were brave.”
“Yes, I was.”
“You saved her.”
“Anybody would have done it.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
She led him upstairs and sat him down on the edge of the bathtub. With a washcloth, she dabbed the blood off his hands and face. There was something about his story she didn’t believe, and then for a moment she didn’t accept a word of it, but she continued to wash him tenderly as if he were the hero he said he was. He groaned quietly when she touched some newly bruised part of him. He would look terrible for a while. How happy that would make him! She could easily get some steak, or hamburger, or whatever you were supposed to apply to a black eye to make the swelling go away, but no, he wouldn’t want that. He would want his badge. They all wanted that.
“Should we go to bed, doctor?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I love you,” she said. They would postpone the argument about feedings until tomorrow, or next week.
“I love you too.”
She took him upstairs and undressed him, just as if he were a child, before lowering him onto the sheets. He sighed loudly. She could hear Raphael’s breath coming from the nursery. She was about to go to her son’s room to check on him and then thought better of it. Standing in the hallway, she heard a voice asking, “What will you do with another day?” Who had asked that? Elijah was asleep. Anyway, it was a nonsensical question. The air had asked it, or she was hearing voices. She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She didn’t quite recognize her own face in the mirror, but the reflected swollen tender breasts were still hers, and the smile, when she thought of sweet Elijah bravely fighting someone, somewhere—that was hers too.
MICHAEL BYERS
Malaria