20.
By order of the freshly anointed Mayor Koch, Vik had spent most of the day hanging out with Bonny. New York public schools had closed early, and while his father slept off a long night haggling at the dock warehouses, Vik spent the afternoon in the office double-checking his father’s entries into the cloth-bound rokat khata and jama nakal, zeroing out the previous month’s nutmeg, cinnamon, fennel, cloves, tamarind, turmeric, pepper, and chili sales. December was always good, then January like a cliff, but they’d done okay. Once he’d squared everything, he stamped the checks and nudged his father, snoring on the settee by the heater, into a state of near-consciousness.
Sign, Pita, he said, dangling pen, deposit slip, and checks. Bonny, without sitting up, cracked his lids to allow the barest sliver of light, and scratched the pen across the checks. His eyes closed and he patted his boy on the arm.
Going to the bank, Vik said.
Bonny raised his hand, his gold pinkie ring glinting, and was asleep before it fell back to his belly. Vik zipped everything into the pouch, clicked the little padlock, and slipped it inside his coat. He went down the stairs, past the blackout curtain over the entrance to the library, the piano theme from The Conversation lilting out.
It was nearly dark outside even though it was not yet four o’clock. Feathery snow was dipping around in the air, and the sky was baggy, foil and slate. Even though he knew the banks were probably closed along with the schools and the office buildings and everything else, he had to get outside, out of the pickled air of the office where his father had been asleep all day and where the soundtrack from Sal’s film would soon be drifting through the wall at a volume just loud enough to distract him from his reading. He was a good kid, ever attendant to the letter of the law. He would try to deposit the checks, but he was also a teenage boy with an ulterior motive. In his other pocket was a Hensoldt Wetzlar Tami pocket edition microscope, a square of black velvet, and a penlight. Extra Rayovacs for the flashlight.
The Chemical branch was on 72nd, five minutes’ walk. A typed notice on letterhead was taped inside the glass:
Beneath that, a rectangle of cardboard, dual hole-punched by a pencil, suspended from a length of string, declared in heavy black Sharpie:
So he roamed. He had pocket money. He saw two movies, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan and Coma. He ate dinner at the Cosmic: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, cubed vegetables, a grape Fanta. He stole glances at the bandaged counterman, who had gone back to his post and was doing his woozy best to stay on his feet after his dustup with John a few hours earlier.
Afterward, Vik rambled some more, down to Columbus Circle, along Central Park South to the Plaza, up Fifth a bit, east on 60th, back down, west on 58th, proscribing a Keanesian pattern of loops and reversals along the southern rim of the park before heading west, for once unconcerned by the vigorous beatings normally awaiting any loner who passed the kids from the Amsterdam Houses and the Lincoln Towers. They were out as usual, but too busy pelting cars with snowballs to bother with him.
By the time he returned to the edge of Penn Yards, his father had already left on his own wild-eyed expedition, the search for Vik that had begun so ignominiously at Cinema West. That father and son didn’t cross paths was just another cruel coincidence on a night full of them. Vik picked a brownstone just east of the yard, one whose windows were dark, climbed the stoop, and tucked himself into the lee side of the porch.
From his pocket he took the Tami, a black and silver cylinder that, collapsed into its protective cup, fit neatly in the palm of a hand and might have been mistaken for a candle snuffer. It was German-manufactured, an artifact from the 1920s that fifty years later remained a coveted item among botanists doing deep fieldwork. Vik was enormously proud of the scope. It had been the first-place award, middle-grade division, 1977 New York State Science Fair, for his experiment tracking Brownian motion in smoke cells.
He cleared a protected corner of the porch of snow, unscrewed the Tami’s hood, and set it down next to the velvet to allow them to equalize to the air temperature.
The blizzard howled off the river, its shoulders down, plowing through the open air above the rail yard. Yet when Vik told me about that night, he never mentioned being cold. He never mentioned the stinging slap of precipitation against his face. When he talked about it, it sounded as if that night he’d gone into a trance, a sort of spiritual snow blindness. I have my suspicions but he insisted he wasn’t stoned. The only thing he mentioned about the weather was that the rail yard was concealed by a variegated wall of snow undulating in the air—his words, not mine. His presence in the blizzard was an act of poetic import, an experience of the same rare clarity I was about to lose, his vision unencumbered by linguistic blinders. The night was transient, not a future page in the brief history of his life. He had no way to record the snowflakes he observed, no camera, no sketchbook. He intended only to catch them on the velvet bed, observe their structure up close, perhaps report back to his science teacher that among the needles and prisms he’d spotted some stellar dendrites, a signal that cloud temperature and humidity were oscillating, a sort of exciting phenomenon to observe from down among the terrans, picking through the diamonds coughed up by the heavenly volcanoes.
And when a figure emerged from the old YMCA, a black blur within the snow globe, and climbed the stairs up to Freedom Place, Vik embraced the poetic visitation he’d been waiting for all along, some untamed, untranslatable figure emerging from the wastes, a welcome mystery. Odd, since he knew the crowd at Sal’s, the cross-eyed weirdos who stashed tacos in their coat pockets and on a good day exuded all the personality of wet plaster, and he must have known that whoever had decided to trek home through the blizzard could only be an exemplar of that homuncular brotherhood, yet he watched the man cross the yard, slowly ascend the iron stairs, and pass directly in front of his bivouac in the shadowed portico of the brownstone.
Before the man turned onto West End he stopped and looked up at the brownstone. He shielded his eyes. Vik raised a hand in greeting, but the man didn’t wave back. He tucked his head and turned north onto West End.
Vik collapsed the Tami and followed him. When the man stopped at 72nd and West End to dig into a snowbank, Vik hung back, a detective shadowing his perp. When the man lifted a table—a full-sized dining table!—onto his back and continued up West End, Vik maintained tail discipline, keeping a block’s distance. His gaspingly lonely adolescent brain was filling out the man’s résumé to fit the form he so desperately sought. A rambler, a stranger in a city of strangers, a quiet outlaw, one whose cutting insights sought a receptive and finely tuned ear, which Vik happened to have two of.