Remy handed the waitress a ten.
“And the hippies!” The old guy shook his head and looked up at Remy, his eyes like tiny polished stones. “Village looked like a goddamn circus. Radicals at Columbia running around yelling, ‘Against the wall, mothers – ’ protests every day, protesters protesting protests. And not like today, these ladies in jogging suits marching on their lunch hour. We had ex-cons with bricks. Honest-to-God agitators. Cops didn’t know whose heads to crack, so they just cracked ’ em all.” He shook his head. “Cracked every goddamn one. Your throw.”
Remy concentrated so that this stone wouldn’t go off the edge, and threw it about halfway, along the right rail. It drifted off the boards, hung a moment, and dropped.
“You have got to be the worst goddamn shuffleboard player I ever seen,” said the old man.
“Bottom line, I suppose it was garbage that killed Lindsay. And in the end it all turned to garbage. The whole city was garbage – schools bad, services bad, crime up, parks and subways a horror show, corrupt cops, and everything we did made it worse. Pay the sanitation workers more to get the garbage, and the teachers strike. Send cops to stop the protests and they beat the protesters, which causes more protests, so we gotta send more cops.”
He turned, grabbed Remy’s arm, and spoke in a low growclass="underline" “This city – is a big goddamn place, kid. A monster. You can’t imagine all the stuff that can go wrong here in a day. This was the city Lindsay ran, the city I had a part in running. For ten goddamn years this place was unlivable. It was a sinkhole. An ungoddamnlivable sinkhole. And then you know what happened? Do you?”
Remy waited. The old man got even closer, so near they could’ve kissed. “It got worssse,” he hissed. “Seventy-six… seven? Bottom rung of hell. Drugs. Gangs. Bankruptcy. I almost moved myself, four, five times.” Then the old man leaned back and thought a moment. “But then something happened. Something… unexpected. A miracle.”
“What?” Remy asked.
Addich took a long drink of beer. “I went… for a walk. One night I couldn’t sleep. I got up early, before dawn. Got dressed. And I went for a walk. It was spring. Air was fresh and clean. And it was amazing… the shopkeepers misting the flowers, kids delivering papers, and there was this couple standing on the stoop next to my building, holding hands, on this date that neither one of them wanted to see end. And it hit me. This is a hard place. God, it’s a hard place. But it wakes up every morning. No matter what you do to it the night before. It wakes up.”
The old man backed away. He stepped up to throw, but turned and considered Remy’s face. “When I saw those lunatics in the Middle East on TV… jumping up and down celebrating because some nut jobs had murdered three thousand people, you know what I thought?”
Remy shook his head.
“I thought, Fuck you. We used to kill that many ourselves in a good year. This city, it doesn’t care about you. Or me. Or them. Or Russell Givens. This city cares about garbage pickup. And trains. That’s the secret… what the crazy assholes will never get. You can’t tear this place apart. Not this city. We’ve been doing it ourselves for three hundred years. The goddamn thing always grows back.”
THE MOON was just a shaving, a bright sliver of lemon peel hung between two buildings. A tuft of cloud drifted below the moon, underlined it, and then skidded away. Remy was standing at the bedroom window of his apartment, staring out between fire escapes at the buildings across the street. He stepped away from the window and let the curtain fall. He rolled his neck, pulled on a pair of jeans, and checked his watch. It was quarter to four. He sat on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes, checking first to make sure there was no blood on them.
So he would take a walk, to the one place where he might still be able to make sense of things. Remy grabbed his coat off a chair and left his apartment, walked down the hall, down the stairs and out onto the stoop. He looked down the block. It was empty; sidewalks glistened in the dark. The air was cool and clear, as if a new shipment had arrived by truck this morning, the old stuff flushed and packed in garbage cans. From the street, Remy looked up at his apartment window. It was dark and implacable, and he had the odd feeling that he might never see his apartment again. He started walking. The streets shined as from a fresh rain, but the sky was icy clear. He breathed in the morning smells: truck exhaust, sewage, bagels – but he didn’t find that smell, and he was surprised that he couldn’t come up with the odor. When had that happened? He had assumed the smell would never leave him. Now he had only a vague memory of it, but the odor itself was different from its memory, the way melancholy proceeds from sorrow.
Remy stepped between two parked cars and crossed the empty street. He paused when he saw a familiar car parked a block from his apartment, illegally, next to a hydrant. Remy made his way over to it and looked down, to the driver’s seat, where Paul Guterak was leaned back, asleep, snoring lightly, his mouth slightly open. He wore a puffy winter coat, lined with horizontal seams, and binoculars around his neck. Across his lap was a notebook. Remy could see writing on the open pages: “0212: Subject BR returns to apartment. 0224: Lights out.” Remy let his hand linger on the windshield for a moment, then tapped lightly on the window.
Guterak started, looked around, and then up at Remy, confused. Finally, he lowered his window. “Oh. Hey. I was just-” But he couldn’t think of anything.
Remy crouched by the window. “Can I see that?”
“Oh.” He handed Remy the notebook. “Sure. You know… you asked me to-”
“Yeah, I remember,” Remy said. The log went back months, although it skipped days at a time. Each page had a date written on top; beneath the date were three columns, showing in military time where and when Remy went and where and when he left. Remy flipped through the entries and saw April’s apartment, Carla and Steve’s house (“stayed in car”), trips to the library and the courthouse and any number of bars and lounges. He saw Nicole’s apartment and the office of Secure Inc. Twice Paul tracked him to the airport, but didn’t follow him inside. It was strange seeing his life like that, and it was far less mysterious than Remy had expected. He found he remembered just about everything on the log, and he was surprised at how useless it was, seeing the places and times without any context, without any why.
Paul yawned. “I’m sorry it’s not more complete. I did the best I could. I’m pretty rusty. I lost you a lot and I kept forgetting to do it.”
“No. It’s fine,” Remy said. He handed it back through the open window. He looked down on his friend. “Did I tell you how much I liked your commercial?”
“You did? Thanks, man. That means a lot to me.”
“You were great.”
“You didn’t think I looked fat compared to that smoker?”
“No. You looked good.”
“Thanks.” Paul sat up in the driver’s seat and shook his head, as if trying to clear his mind. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” He leaned against the window frame.
Paul looked around, as if worried that someone was listening. “Do you ever feel like things got away from you?”
Remy smiled.
“I was sitting there the other night, with Tara, watching myself in that cereal commercial, and I swear to fuggin’ God, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what happened. I mean, I should be as happy as shit. But the one person I wanted to see it with… was Stacy. Of all the people… that ungrateful cow. But I swear to God… it was like… I had this moment… I honestly didn’t know how I got where I was. Do you know what I mean? Does that ever happen to you?”