But Vik got too close. John Caldwell was, after all, a New Yorker born and bred, eyes in the back of his head, and he’d already had one run-in that night. It’s not that John feared for his physical well-being. He knew the kid on his six was the missing boy. But he’d already done him one favor by leaving him alone. Now he’d gotten himself into some kind of lost-puppy situation, and John had already made his decision, back there at Cinema West. Around 75th Street, he ditched the table, spun toward Vik, and charged. Not a jog or a slippery trudge through the snow, but a full-tilt attack-speed charge. He was waving his arms and yelling, and Vik fled through the intersection before cutting toward Riverside Park. He didn’t slow down when he hit the waist-deep snow that covered the open field between Riverside and the Hudson. Vik crossed the park, fighting the drifts until he saw nothing but icy river in front him.
He crouched against a tree by the river, roughed up by the wind, bummed out. And it was there that he encountered his second Caldwell of the night, making passage through the blizzard, leaning into the driving wind as he picked his way along the railing that was intended to keep pedestrians from falling into the Hudson.
21.
At grade, the average American walks a mile in about twenty minutes, at a speed just a hair over three miles per hour, and an average American heart prefers to beat about seventy-five times a minute. Between the two exists a proportional, rhythmic relationship. You ask most people in the city and they’ll tell you the average New Yorker covers a block a minute (and then they’ll qualify it with, Not avenue blocks, obviously). But the average New Yorker in truth walks twenty blocks, or one mile, in fifteen minutes, at an average speed of four miles per hour, more like one-point-three blocks a minute. How do we account for that extra point-three? Okay, New Yorkers are on-the-go, unstoppable, undaunted by all manner of street-level effluvia that might cause the heartiest Topekan to retch and reach for the Lysol. However, it’s when we consider the myriad obstacles that confront a pedestrian in this city that the extra point-three gets really mysterious.
Even by a conservative factoring of waiting times at crosswalks, crowd density, sidewalk blockages caused by incidentals like vegetable pallets, stroller phalanxes, the old and infirm, flying wedges of tourists, bike messengers, construction fencing incursions, scaffolding, dumpsters, and the insane who walk in front of you pulling ooda-loop maneuvers on the widest stretches of unpopulated pavement, telepathically predicting your every countermove, the average New York pedestrian burns five to seven minutes over the course of a twenty-block transit jagging, zigging, charting a path that consists more of diversions than adherence to any single bearing, to say nothing of the decelerations required, occasional near-dead stops (though, notably, never actually stopping, always shuffling left, right, jockeying, inching ever farther into the street at a DO NOT WALK signal, timing a gap to shoot). After all that, what could account for the point-three? Is it possible the average unencumbered, obstacle-free New Yorker actually walks an average of six miles an hour, which is in most corners of the world considered a decent pace for a jog? It’s the only possible explanation. New Yorkers, weaned on smog, tilted ever forward into the oncoming barrage of whatever, living in fear of the faster whoever coming up from behind, have developed bigger hearts than the steadfast Topekan, their sinus rhythm/leg-speed ratios increasing to the point that they’re basically running even though it looks like they’re walking.
When John Caldwell left the Apelles for Roosevelt Hospital, he knew he’d be walking. The MTA had stabled the Broadway local at the Inwood depot, silent and dark. The buses were long gone. Taxis, with the exception of the one that had nearly killed my father, had evaporated. Roosevelt was twenty blocks south, a mile.
My father, compelled by fears about his own elbows-deep relationship with whatever was going on vis-à-vis Albert Caldwell, insisted on going with John, and they agreed—first thing first, according to the law applied to a group of two or more men on an excursion of any effort and distance: establish travel time in as expedient a manner as possible—that they would be at the hospital by 1:00 a.m. Strictly speaking, it didn’t matter what time they got there. It was a hospital, after all, it wasn’t going to close. But as the unacquainted do when forced into close proximity, they had seized on that minor point of procedure with the single-minded focus of a pair of physicists on an equation binge.
Once they’d agreed that they’d be there by 1:00, they settled into silence. My father, not normally given to conversation anyway, but definitely predisposed to worrisome thoughts, was occupied by a real behemoth. He was thinking that he, of all the people in the world, he was the one who could have stopped Albert. To put it another way (the way his ghastly brain did), my father was the one who had facilitated whatever fate had befallen Albert.
And he wasn’t entirely wrong. It was his nature to stay out of the fray, but he’d known about Albert’s plan—he’d been aware of the existence of a plan, at least—and despite that natural tendency to avoid participation at all costs, he’d been instrumental in bringing Albert to the point of executing that plan. And the execution was taking a different shape than what he’d imagined. Why would he ever have thought Albert intended to go quietly? None of it made much sense—if he’d tried with pills at home, why had he called an ambulance? If he had wanted to OD at the hospital, why had he disappeared? Whatever form my father thought it would take, the reality of the old man’s suicide now fully asserted itself on his psyche. He felt as though his blood had been drained and replaced with mercury. That’s why, when John had tried to set out on his own, my father insisted on accompanying him, and had been keeping pace alongside him, a self-appointed minder charged with ensuring his safe passage.
They’d gone another two blocks when John turned to him and said, Really. If you’re doing this to keep me company, don’t.
I have my reasons, my father said—shouted, actually, over the gusting wind. They both were shouting.
This is family business.
I can go a different way if you prefer, my father said.
Suit yourself, John said.
They passed the next ten or so blocks in silence. At every cross street the wind bullied them from the sides, the snow plastering them like buckshot. My father barely noticed. At 1:01 a.m., he followed John through the revolving door at Roosevelt.
The sanitary warmth enveloped him and he set to brushing off the drifts that had piled up in his jacket’s every crevice and crystallized little arctic kingdoms in his hair, rivulets retreating around the ovoid arch of his ear and down his neck. A skirt of beaded ice clung to the lower edge of his sweater, resisting all efforts to remove it, glinting wetly, flaunting its snotty tenacity. He yanked at one wet crystal and succeeded only in ripping out a flag of gray wool.
My father was ashamed at where his thoughts had gone. Albert had made sure to protect him, hadn’t he? He’d sworn to my father’s safety, legally speaking. Hadn’t that been an essential aspect of his participation? He should have insisted on seeing the letter, but he’d taken Albert’s word.
The lobby was full of strandees sprawled over the modular furniture. A security guard leaned against a pillar, gazing across the lobby at his reflection in the plate-glass window. His arms were crossed and his cap was tipped back on his head. A toothpick slid from one corner of his mouth to the other and back. Black pro-grade shoes. Off-duty cop. Did a cop ever put his hands in his pockets? Thumbs in belt or arms crossed, done and done.