“What?” he says.
“I know where she is,” I say.
“Where?”
“I’ll be back,” I say, and start for the front door.
“Let me come with you.”
I turn to him. My hand is already on the door knob.
“I’d better go alone, Aaron.”
Our eyes meet.
Aaron nods.
“Good luck, bro,” he says.
I open the door and step out into the hall. Behind me, I hear my mother say, “Don’t call the police!”
I close the door on her words, and walk swiftly to the elevators.
There is more traffic in the streets than anyone might expect on a hot weekday in August, when most New Yorkers are at the beach or in the mountains. And though I keep urging the turbaned Sikh cabbie to please step on it, his dark-eyed gaze meets mine implacably in the rear-view mirror. He drops me off on the northeast corner of Columbus and Seventy-second. I turn the corner and hurry eastward, toward the park. There is a dry cleaning establishment that wasn’t there sixteen years ago. There is also a deli I don’t remember. The candy store seems familiar but I do not recognize the Korean man behind the counter.
The building we lived in for so many years stands like a white-brick fortress between two shorter red-brick buildings that flank it like bookends. A green awning with the address on it in white stretches toward the curb. There was no uniformed doorman when we were living there. Neither is there one now. There is, instead, a short sturdy man in his sixties, wearing jeans and high-topped workman’s shoes, and a blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms.
The years have been kind to Mr. Alvarez.
His complexion is smooth and his dark eyes sparkle, and the mustache under his nose is neatly trimmed. He turns as I approach the building, smiles, asks, “Help you, sir?” and then recognizes me. “Andrew?” he says. “Andrew?” and holds both hands out to me. I take his hands. Grinning, he keeps staring into my face. “How are you, Andrew?” he asks. His accent is as thick as it was when I was a boy growing up. “Are you looking for your sister?”
“Yes. Is she here?”
“She got here about an hour ago. I let her go up the roof to see the pigeons. Is that okay?”
“Sure, thank you, Mr. Alvarez.”
I am thinking she was wandering the city all night long. She just got here an hour ago. I am thinking I may not be too late.
“Is she all right, Andrew?”
I hesitate for a moment.
Then I say, “No, Mr. Alvarez, she’s very sick. Can you please call the police for me, tell them to send an ambulance? I’ll be on the roof with her.”
“She works for the FBI now, your sister?”
“No,” I say, and rush into the lobby toward the elevator bank. I push the button, and the doors slide open. I move into the car, press the button for twenty-three.
“Is your father still painting?” Mr. Alvarez asks.
But before I can answer, the doors close.
The big metal fire door to the roof is closed, but not locked. I twist the knob, and shove the door open, and come out onto a tarred roof that is blisteringly hot in the noonday sun. I turn automatically and at once toward the pigeon coops on the right. The birds huddle on their perches, cooing softly, gently rustling their wings.
Annie is sitting on the floor of the roof, in the shade of the pigeon coops, her back to them, her arms around her knees, her head bent. She is wearing a light chiffon shift that riffles in the breeze. Her hair is blowing around her face. Twenty-four stories below, I can hear the rush of traffic, the incessant murmur of the city. I walk to her swiftly.
“Annie?” I say.
She looks up.
“Hi,” she says. “Which one is Lyo-lyok? I looked at all the geese, but I couldn’t tell which one she is, they all look the same to me now. None of them have identities anymore.”
“I don’t think she’s here, honey.”
“Oh, sure, she is. She’s going to fly me to the North Sea.”
“I don’t think so, honey. Come on, let’s go home.” I say, and reach for her hand.
“No!” she shouts, and recoils from me, her eyes wide.
“It’s me, honey,” I say. “You don’t have to...”
“I know who it is, don’t tell me who it is.”
She squints at me, brushes hair out of her eyes.
“So you found me, huff?” she says. “You knew where to find me.”
“I heard the pigeons.”
“I knew you’d figure it out. Did you tell Mama where I am?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Don’t tell her.”
“I won’t.”
“She’ll call them again.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Do you know what she did?” she asks, and turns to me, her eyes wide. “She called some twerp at a so-called health facility, and told her I’m mentally ill, can you believe it? That’s another way of stealing a person’s identity, you know. They declare you mentally ill, and bingo, they steal your identity! It’s a very sophisticated way of controlling a person. Once you own a person’s identity, you control that person, you see. It’s like getting raped. If you rape a person, you own that person for the rest of your life. Because you’ve violated her mind and her body. It’s all about control, it’s all about identity. If you can’t keep your own identity, what’s the use? That’s why I had to get out of there, Andy. Because Mama called them, and they were onto me.”
“I didn’t tell her where you are, honey.”
“She’s crazy, you know. She hears voices. She told me she hears voices. Can you believe it? She looks just like a regular person, doesn’t she? But Morgan le Fay used to be able to assume different forms, too, you know Do you remember when Kay and the Wart first met her? Lying on a bed of lard, that was so funny! She wasn’t beautiful at all, just this big fat slob lying in all that lard, ick! Mama’s a messenger of the Great Oppression, you know, come to abolish the Tantric religion. I was warned by my guru,” she says, and looks directly into my face.
Her eyes are wide.
I think of Archimedes the owl. I remember my father reading to us. I remember the little girl who was my precious sister, Annie.
“Fire comes out of Mama’s mouth,” she whispers, “did you know that? She told me it was my fault Daddy left, because he didn’t want so many children, and she wouldn’t let him smoke in the living room. He wasn’t expecting two of us, you see, he didn’t know there’d be twins. So he told her to get rid of me, and when she wouldn’t he left with his bimbo, is what she told me. But smoke was pouring out of her mouth when she said it, so I knew it wasn’t true. Well, you’ve seen the smoke, you know what it’s like.”
I sit beside her.
She does not try to move away.
Together, we sit in the shade, our backs to the coops.
“No one holds my hand anymore,” she says.
I take her hand in mine.
“No one likes me,” she says.
“I like you,” I say.
“Well, you,” she says, and smiles. “Dear Andy.”
She puts her head on my shoulder.
She seems so tired.
We sit holding hands like children.
I can remember the two of us running in the park together, hand in hand. I can remember the two of us in school together, our hands popping up whenever a teacher asked a question. She was so smart, my sister. So beautiful. My twin. My dearest twin.
“Mama’s such a liar,” she says, shaking her head. “It wasn’t my fault Daddy left, it was Sven’s.”
“Come on,” I say, “let’s go home. We’ll worry about Mama later.”
“No, Andy, we’ve got to worry about her now,” she says earnestly. “She wants to put me in a strait jacket again. Have you ever been in a strait jacket, do you know what that feels like? If Daddy had known what they were doing to me, he’d’ve been there in a minute! He writes to me all the time, you know, we correspond regularly when I’m abroad. He told me all about why he left, never mind Mama’s story. The minute he found out what Sven and I were doing in Stockholm, he booked a ticket. By the time he got there Sven was already gone, of course, well, sure, he’d already stolen my identity, what did he care?”