I’ve been told that once incarcerated, when time was available at a discount and reflection was encouraged as a means of reducing recidivism, Feeney claimed to have given the matter a great deal of thought and arrived at the conclusion that his actions had been redemptive. He expressed amazement that his own life—an old creased map he’d hardly even bothered to consult anymore—could have surprised him so. By his reckoning, it was his own weekly childhood buggering by the next-door neighbor that had saved my life. All the suffering and shame had served a goddamn purpose, after all! How intricate and unknowable, he would say, is the universe that God hath wrought!
Like many a God-fearing man, Sid Feeney’s interpretative powers were governed by the desperately optimistic belief that there’s got to be a brighter day just around the corner. Well, Sid Feeney found his, and I suppose that’s worth something.
The first thing Feeney had done was punch Albert in the face. That got no reaction, so Feeney grabbed Albert by the neck. It was then that I began to wake from the strange dream, a dream about a flood, that Albert had invaded.
Feeney’s bladder had gone ahead and begun to empty itself when he’d hoisted Albert up onto his shoulders, an enuretic saddle forming along the inseam of his khakis. When I opened my eyes, Feeney was already at the door. Albert was naked, draped over his shoulders like a sack of rice but, being wider than both a bag of rice and the doorway, suffering the comic trope of having his head slammed repeatedly against the doorframe. Eventually Feeney prevailed and muscled him through. I trailed after them, pulled out of the room by the thread that connected me to Albert, a weird sense of familiarity, locked together by his presence in my dream. Through the smoky foyer, vortices swirling off Albert’s protruding buttocks, past the Joan Mitchell, toward the wash of music. The crowd parted.
I witnessed Sid Feeney’s crazed path across the dance floor. In the living room, the wind tearing through the terrace doors had cleared the smoke, and the snow had created a white runway that he mounted as though summiting a mountain peak. His legs stabbed forward and he was yelling. I couldn’t make out the words over the percussive force of the music blowing through my body, but learned later that he was issuing the Roman war cry, Barritus. Sid Feeney was a maniac. Of course no one tried to stop him. What were they going to stop him from doing? Who could have imagined? No one touched Feeney, but a few slapped Albert’s naked rear as he passed because, you know, what a riot.
Once Sid Feeney was on the terrace, he went directly to the parapet and threw Albert Caldwell over.
He’d done it with a dipping, shrugging movement, as though Albert were, in fact, only a sack of rice destined for its spot in a general store display. He just tipped his shoulders and down Albert went. It was his composure, I think, that blinded everyone, causing those very people who’d seen him commit a murder, those people who’d been standing right next to him, to question the trustworthiness of their own senses. He was so cool about it, how could they square what they’d thought they’d seen with what had actually happened? Obviously what they thought they’d seen was some kind of illusion, or a hallucination. It was simply not possible. He’d thrown a… bag of something, right? What the hell was it? Sack of sand? Was it some sort of mannequin? A sex doll? What a gas! Feeney walked back inside to the bar table, where old Franklin, standing with his back to the terrace, had seen nothing, and in his long-suffering way leaned in to hear Feeney’s order.
No one looked over the edge. Once Feeney had his glass of whiskey in hand, he crossed the living room, where the dancing had stopped and little constellations of eyeballs had formed to stare at him. He took a seat on the sofa, where his bladder continued to leak. He was about seventy-five feet from the terrace doors, and the crowd outside, like exiles amassed on the deck of their escape vessel, was frozen, staring in at him as though he manned the cannon on the cruiser that had tracked them, the one who could sink them or allow them to slip into the fog and escape.
About thirty people on the terrace had witnessed him throw Albert over the parapet. Another hundred had stepped aside when he’d zagged through the living room. They’d seen him carry a person—a torso, arms, a head of white hair, the pickled feet, the sad little cuttlefish dangling between those scrawny legs—across the room and onto the terrace, only to return without the person.
Sid Feeney had once lived at the Apelles, before the West Side turned into a communo-miscegenist freak show and he’d fled across the park to the East Side. He was familiar with the tradition that had led to the genesis of the Apelles Fund. He’d sent his check that year, enough to keep Jane Vornado off his back.
So when he yelled, I made my goddamn donation! I’m entitled! surely more than a few of those within earshot would have gotten the reference if they’d been able to hear anything over the music. Would they have even thought it was a crazy thing to say?
Worth noting: observing a murder while scrambled on quaaludes doesn’t make one a reliable witness, and if the shock sobered the crowd up, they collectively dove right into their pockets for another dose. Before long, the witnesses had shaken the whole scene off like a bad dream, which was how most of them described it to themselves the next day: a bad dream, a thing too weird, too unbelievable, to have actually happened. Those who got pinned down by New York’s finest were all, you know, somewhere else in the apartment, or looking the other way, or were embarrassed to say they had no memory at all of the party. You know how it is. But that night, staring at Feeney, wetting himself over there on the sofa with his drink on his knee, they knew it had happened, every one of them, because no one joked about it, and no one turned to a neighbor and said, Hey, did you see that? Without speaking, they collectively agreed to an alternative reality. It’s a common occurrence, more common than we might think. Silence alters the past.
No one at the party called the police. No one jumped on Sid Feeney and pinned him to the floor. No one freaked out and ran around the room pulling out her hair and ululating. No one fainted. One by one, people drifted in from the terrace. The constellations broke apart. People started swaying again, almost like dancing. Their arms moved as though they were shoveling dirt into a narrow channel of shared memory. All was forgotten. Except by me.
Part III
15.
He was in a hospital. There was water to the south. Albert’s eyes felt like oblong, distended cones straining against his eyelids, the cornea aching against the tender conjunctiva like a hatchling working at the shell. They wanted out, they wanted to see! Oh, deny not the sweet delight of oculism! But deny he did, clenching tightly as he lay in the bed listening to the clicking wall clock and timing his breathing to the second hand in approximation of a sleeper’s respiration. In, hold hold, out, hold hold. In, hold hold, out, hold hold. The nurse was still there. What in Satan’s fiery red hell was she doing?
Polishing her nails? He’d never known a nurse to do anything more than the absolute minimum required. Needle in, needle out, roll, cover, and tuck. Their smug polyester hips and square shoes, the stern architecture of their caps. Where were those romantic nurses of the Great War, plump, young, and dimpled, so eager to subsume their own desires to the recovery and carnal repair of the wounded soldier? Of course, not even the most patriotic example would be able to bring herself to minister to Albert’s sallow flesh. He remembered what it was to be young; to have no awareness of one’s body as anything other than an instrument of pleasure. He hadn’t lost that memory. To be old was to be an encyclopedia of the plights of the flesh, lord of a crumbling manor. It made you zealous in your adherence to those routines that, when performed in the proper order, might reduce your pain one-tenth of one percent. Constant awareness of your own decrepitude. How many times had he been in and out of the hospital over the last ten years? Five? Ten? Prostate, heart, colon, an iron triangle of ailments, each one a subtraction of pleasure: a good orgasm, a good walk, a good shit, all gone. Leakage, palpitations, fear of the outside, depression.