Vik, desperately trying to understand: Illiterates?
Albert: No idea that it’s all fibs. They get so exercised.
Vik, clueing in: Oh yes, I understand.
Albert: Other than newspapers, however, where would one get one’s information?
Vik: The television?
Albert: Fool! The television hasn’t even been invented!
Vik: Sir, do you need a cop? (And none of that New York smart-ass on the sir, either.)
Albert: Certainly not. They are the last to know. If they knew anything about how to do their jobs, they’d arrive before the crime, wouldn’t they?
Vik: Do you live nearby, sir?
Albert: Why would I go home?
Vik: Because it’s cold out here.
Albert: Why would I go home?
Vik: To see your family.
Albert: At the Apelles?
Vik: The big place on 78th?
Albert: The Apelles, yes.
Vik: That’s where you live?
Albert: I suppose so. I suppose I should go home? Is that it?
Vik: I think so?
See? Easy, simple, nothing sinister in their exchange, just a decent kid helping a senile old man on the worst night of the year. Their little story might have rounded out a blizzard box deep inside the Times, nestled in there among the rowdy Queens runts chucking snowballs at the police cruisers (say hey, whaddya want, city kids, amirite?) and Stella Kilgore age ninety-seven’s first-person account of the great blow job of 1888 (ma’am, you have to stop saying that, no, what, never mind, go ahead, I’ll just put down…), a bridge club from Hartford on their way to Key West for a tournament, stuck at JFK for the night but guess what they did? Played bridge! Enterprising bartender invents the Manhattan Whiteout to delight of trapped guests at the Plaza! Etc.
Nothing pulls the city together like a natural disaster. Metro section, B5:
John Caldwell, 31, involved in an altercation at the Cosmic Diner on the Upper West Side Monday afternoon, later sought out his adversary at Roosevelt Hospital to apologize. Caldwell attributed his decision to a change of heart, and made a peace offering of a cup of coffee.
“I thought it was decent of him,” said the employee of the Cosmic, who asked that his name be withheld, having been released after treatment for a mild concussion. “I don’t know I would have done the same thing.”
When asked why he and the Cosmic employee had tangled, Caldwell had no comment. One witness to the reconciliation noted that it was “a sort of good will to man kind of night.”
“Drugs,” said a nurse who spoke anonymously, as she was not authorized to speak to the press. “They’re all on drugs.”
32.
We reach the hot, molten center of my discord. Vik, age thirteen, had deposited Albert Caldwell, age seventy-four, a man on a mission of self-erasure, alone in a bedroom with me, age six. It was the innocent mistake of a boy to whom an old man was an authority, trustworthy by virtue of age alone. He said later he thought my presence in the room might have been a solace to Albert.
The revel was thumping away just outside the door. I was facedown, the razor-sharp creases of my uniform skirt’s box pleats bowed suggestively open or snapped suggestively shut, my shirt untucked, a sliver of glowing skin exposed at my waistband, the line of skin at the bottom of my leggings, the buttons of my elbows, the radii of my wrists as delicate as tulip stems, every inch of it an enticement. The dried blood on my scalp some sort of symbol. Albert, whose eyes no longer functioned as traps for light, didn’t see me, but he sensed me. He removed his clothing.
Albert was practiced in the art of occupation. He was receptive to the thoughts and feelings of the child in the room with him, postmaster to my mental correspondence. Chief among these communications was my dream, the dream of Slade, again pawing along the high beam in the barn. Already Albert had entered the dream, a silent observer, and I was aware of him but there was no cause for alarm, no more than I’d express over the sudden appearance of a tree or an old cow. He stood behind me on the dusty floor of the barn, in the hazy gray light, and while I watched Slade, he watched me. There was no water in my dream, which is perhaps what had attracted him most, some need to equalize by his presence the absence of that essential element, to soak the brittle straw and corn husk, to give weight to the dust, to tamp down the atmosphere’s lightness. He was sodden, his cell walls shredding as water broke through mesothelium to drown his organs, swell his muscle fibers to exploding, insinuate his bones, turning them to mealy pulp, filling his fingers, his palms, his arms, a spring cracking the stone within him and flooding his every thought, straining away color and texture, rendering him featureless, smooth as an eyeball.
I was dry, dry, dry, and he was overwhelmed by my scent. I was earth and altitude, the smell of cold astringency and absence, of life itself, unstained. His urge to fill the dryness with himself was overwhelming, an army marshaled to slaughter reasoned thought; compared to this, the urge to procreate was a pebble in his shoe. I was drawing him like a source of gravity, capillary action absorbing him into the dream, and the barn filled with water, I filled with water…
And I was kicking to the surface, which was thick with a skin of dust and straw. I punctured it, reached for the beam, and Slade was there, his tail twitching, the water still rising, and what did Slade do? He flew. I held tight to his small soft body and we soared through the loft doors, above the water, and as we escaped the roaring ocean consuming the topography below, dialing up the sides of houses and sinking the peaks of roofs, swallowing trees, telephone poles, flattening and darkening the world, I turned my head to the side and I saw a lone jag of rock jutting out of the dark sea. We flew closer and I saw that atop the angle of stone there was a birdbath, and sparrows were perched there, dipping their small bodies and flipping diamonds of water off their wings, oblivious to the flood.
Slade and I zoomed away from the water but not in fear, for we could fly forever, we could live in the sky, but it was troubling me, the water’s gelid menace. It was alive. It could send up a silvery palm and slap us out of the sky, and I urged Slade higher, until we were so high I was sure we were unreachable, as high as the tallest buildings I knew of, the World Trade towers. Good Slade!
I knew that Albert, like a dog that had treed a raccoon, snarling jaws white with foam, would starve, freeze, burn, waste away waiting for me to descend. I knew it was him, the old man who lived downstairs, trying to tempt me down, cooing liquid sibilance, Devonian soundings that rose and fell like wind, mere Hertzian insinuations because, after all, he was already in my head. That is to say, even in the dream, I knew that he already inhabited me, and the clear eyes I once used to view the world clouded and I was awash in metaphor. Yes, I understood the water was not water but Albert, and also that his voice was not a voice but a song in my memory, that I was dreaming, that nothing in the world was only itself, but a twin, that everything, even my own self, had divided into the real and the imagined, and that the two were interchangeable and that it was impossible to tell which was which.
33.
Real or imagined: I was the only credible witness to the murder of John Caldwell. Yes, John, who had turned back to the hospital to make peace with the counterman, driven by a strange attraction to difficulty, or by a sense of guilt, or a need to be forgiven, or by that flaw universal among those who are drawn to the stage: a desperate desire to be loved by strangers. And then propelled again to his father’s building by the same impulse. John, whose impeccable and atrocious timing, whose every second at the hospital making amends to the counterman from the Cosmic, whose every snowbound step over to West End and then north to pick up his dining table from the package room at the Apelles, or to check to see if his father had returned, or some other mix of bad fate and benevolence (conjecture, as he’s unavailable for interview, long gone), whose every hitch, every lurch, every scarf adjustment, whose every pause to clear his nostrils became, on the timeline of his existence, overweighted with import as he approached the Apelles, accreting dread suspense, as his path drew him ever closer to the spot in the snow where his father, traveling at a high rate of speed on the x-axis, would intersect finally with his own plot on the y-axis, an empty set fixed at an exact point on the night’s grid.