Even the other, the older (the no-longer-baby), will one day forget his discovery and accept the household as it appears to everyone else. Yet in some distant part of him the realization survives and it will return to him at certain moments as a warning against unequivocal trust. At any moment, those closest, those one loves, he knows, can turn out to be enemies in disguise. Once you know that, even if it is something you refuse to countenance, it remains with you like the residue of a dream.
One day he will wake up from a different dream no longer himself, transformed in his sleep as his parents had been, as others will be, into a perfect imitation of the real thing. It is his fortune, he supposes. It is the way things are.
The Penthouse Heist
This is a heist or rehearsal for one. There are six of us in the elevator going to the penthouse floor. The operator is suspicious and calls downstairs for confirmation. “Let half of them go up,” says a mug’s voice over the intercom. “Take the other half to another floor.” I try not to think about what will happen if they catch us. The machine gun has been broken down into three parts, each part hidden under the coat of a different person. If anyone of the three with a fragment of machine gun gets separated from the others, we are without a weapon.
I get off with two of my colleagues, both teenagers, at the penultimate floor, which is the thirty-ninth, while the others continue to the roof. What we will do — it is unspoken but agreed upon — is climb the final flight and rendezvous at the penthouse entrance.
I have this vision of us getting to the top and the roof opening like a flower. Then what? We set up the machine gun and wait. Eventually what we are after will come to us.
There are no stairs or at least no sign of stairs, no door with Exit or Entrance printed across its back. We discuss in whispers what to do. Our first concern is to get the machine gun together and our next is not to be caught.
We take the next elevator down to Lobby — there is no Up elevator on the thirty-ninth floor — and find ourselves confronted by a hostile crowd. To this point, we are innocent, I remind my colleagues.
“Are you a member of the troublemakers’s party?” a plainclothes doorman asks me.
I say we’re here to see a member of the family.
The doorman laughs facetiously. “A blood relation, I’ll bet, I know the man, okay? Against his judgment, he sleeps with a dead horse.”
My cohorts, Gabbo and Pinky, can’t help giggling at the door man’s unpleasant humor. I push the Up button and wait for the elevator’s return.
“What’s the apartment number in which this blood relation resides? I’ll just buzz him first if you don’t mind to let him know you’re on your way.”
“He lives where he sleeps,” I say. “If it’s all the same to you, we’d like to surprise him.”
I can see that the doorman is suspicious of our intent or perhaps doesn’t understand English, merely mouths the few phrases he’s learned by rote.
“No way, no pay,” he says. “Job of doorman is to announce all visitors. The management of this building discourages surprises.”
The elevator arrives and while the doorman is distracted by some other irregularity, we occupy the elevator. The car this time is self-operated and I push P for penthouse and C for close. As the door shuts providentially in the doorman’s red face, his finger is raised to make a point. We will hear from him again, I suppose.
This elevator moves without the urgency of the first, checking into every floor on the way up without opening its doors. Pinky wets his pants, a puddle at his feet. I wonder if we’re in a trap. When we get to the penthouse the daylight is gone and the kids with me have grown up. I’ve never been on an elevator that slow before.
The elevator releases us into the penthouse apartment itself, a surprising place of exit. Our former companions, the other three, are sitting on a thick-napped purple rug, playing cards in a perfunctory manner.
“What took you so long?” the dealer says. “We’ve been bored out of our minds.” His companions yawn, as if on cue, a surly lot.
“Where is the machine gun?” I ask.
They don’t seem to know, look inside one another’s coats, empty out pockets.
“There are three parts,” I remind them. “You have two of them and I have one.”
In the lost time, this bunch seems to have forgotten the arrangements, and though I am only peripherally involved in the heist, a man with a sociological interest in crime, I am obliged to recount the plot to the rest of them. When I finish they stand up and applaud.
“That’s it!” their spokesman says. “How could we forget? When you sit around for years, waiting, sometimes your mind wanders. If you ask me, I think we’ve let opportunity slip through our fingers.”
I take charge in the absence of official command. “Put everything of value in laundry bags and let’s get out of here before we’re discovered.”
I wonder what has happened to the occupant of the penthouse, my nominal relative, but think it’s best not to ask. I hope they had more sense than to kill him, though they seem capable, this crew, of almost any extreme.
What they are not capable of is distinguishing valuables from trash and they manage in their collective fever of greed to loot the house of almost all its portables, filling fifteen laundry bags before they’re through.
I suggest a compromise measure — two bags apiece — and the crew (I stay out of the discussion) argue about what to take and what to leave behind.
“I myself go for stuff with sentimental value,” Pinky says.
“Who’s to decide what stays and what goes?”
“That’s my view too,” says the spokesman for the other three. “The value of an object depends on what it means to who wants it.”
I try to work out a principle that will satisfy all of us. “You blindfold me,” I say. “The three bags I touch will be the three we leave behind. How does that sound?”
My suggestion is rejected, though they decide to blindfold me anyway.
The explanation comes when they are about to leave. “Five goes into fifteen three times,” says the group’s leader. “It is easier to leave a blind leader behind than three valued sacks.” It has come to that.
I apologize for my unfelicitous advice, plead with my former colleagues to reconsider my situation. My abjectness is cement to their hearts. “You’re just lucky we don’t make you really sorry,” their youthful spokesman says.
I am thrust into a closet in which a man and woman, also bound and blindfolded, seem to have prior tenancy.
The reason I can see them is that the jostling and bumping I received has moved my blindfold down over one eye.
“Don’t hurt us,” the woman says. “You are welcome to our valuables. Anything your heart desires is yours.”
“It’s too late for that,” I say.
“You’re not a hardened criminal,” she says, “are you? You have a kind voice, a kind of kind voice, not sticky or false like some. If you untied me, you’d find undying gratitude behind these bonds.”
When I untie the woman, she threatens to call the police, becomes noisy and belligerent. The woman wrestles with me while the husband, his hands tied in front of him, rushes to the phone. I push the woman away, but she comes back, leeching on to my shirt, accusing me of unspeakable crimes. I drag her to the door with me and pull us both out of the apartment.
The woman is still holding on to me, shredding my shirt with her long nails, as I get into the elevator.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I say.