In this city without climbable trees, he’d taken to early rising and writing on boyfriends’ fire escapes. And it was this way, just on the other side of four a.m., that he’d penned his great epic, In the Eye of the Shitstorm, and that, really, had been the beginning of all the trouble.
Looking back on it all now, Jacob could hardly believe he’d even attempted it. One thousand, nine hundred and thirty-two lines (in honor of the year that All Real Literature had died inside of Hart Crane, when he’d jumped into the Gulf of Mexico) and told in thirty-three sections (one for each year that Walt Whitman had worked on Leaves of Grass). God, Jacob thought, what a pretentious little ass you were. It didn’t matter; he missed the confidence that had permitted it. Missed the fury that had blinded him to all paying of bills, all feeding of self, all sleeping at night until it was finished. It had taken him two weeks, and he’d begun to believe he’d never really recovered.
The poem had come after the suicide of his uncle Miles, a man from St. Louis who at forty-five had been able to fix anything motorized or mechanical. He had taken Jacob fishing for the first time when he was a boy out on the Missouri River. He had also been the first gay man Jacob had known. Miles had been thought to be just a happy bachelor by the rest of the Blaumann family. Only Jacob, at eight, had known the truth, after seeing his uncle embracing the shadow of another man behind a boathouse. It was their secret and Jacob had kept it, even after Miles swallowed a pharmaceutical cornucopia in the back of a Dodge Dart parked near the river.
His poem, In the Eye of the Shitstorm, was about his other great childhood idol, the only other superhero he’d ever believed in: Michael Jordan, hanging himself from the backboard of a basketball net in a Brooklyn schoolyard. The poem dipped in and out of the troubled life of the iconic athlete, circling the legend but never landing. The main character, in fact, wasn’t the great Number Twenty-three at all. Jacob’s “stroke of genius” (according to his editors at the Roebling Press) was beginning the poem just after the paparazzi and police had cleared the court of the body.
They have, in their thoughtless hurry, left behind the enormous pile of, well, shit that Number Twenty-three left beneath the basket when he’d strung himself up. A nameless janitor is brought in on a Sunday morning to remove the excrement. Most of the thirty-three epic sections, and the 1,932 lines, detailed the life of this nobody, as he makes various attempts to clean the famous man’s fecal matter from the tarmac. He eventually settles on using his hose to steadily wash it all toward a drain on the edge of the court, where the crap begins to spiral in great Coriolis circles, forming a veritable hurricane of shit, the central image of the poem.
The Mariani Prize committee had particularly loved the “deft handling of pop-cultural allusions” (fearing litigation, Jacob had referred to Jordan throughout only as “Number Twenty-three”) and his “unblinking insight into modern racial discourse” (Jacob had never quite figured out what that meant). Among the other accolades they’d heaped upon the poem were that it was “unabashedly obscene” and that he was “a man’s poet like none since Bukowski”—misguided sentiments that made Jacob retch. Four years later these praises were braided together into the strands of a noose that he’d cinched around his own neck.
Reading Shitstorm sickened him now. He’d been angry as hell those two weeks when it had poured out of him. At the time he thought it honest, full of pure rage. A mirror held up to the sickness of the world. But as time had passed, he had come to realize that under all the sly references and ballsy profanity, his poem had only one monotonous undertone — the same shrill buzzing that had been in his head that whole week, in the wake of his uncle Miles. Beneath all the rest was only one sound. It went fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and fuck you. And that was all.
Jacob tried to shake all this from his head as people poured onto the train at Union Square. The car was crowded, and the swell of Brooklyn-bound bodies began to prick at something inside him. He felt hot and sick and shaky. He felt the worm begin to break, but with his eyes squeezed tight, he thought he might make it. He was so close. Just two quick stops, and he’d be free. He would coax it all out at last.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” came a quaking voice behind him.
Not now, Jacob begged, keeping his eyes shut tight. But he could smell unwashed skin. He could feel hot breath passing his ear.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to bother you,” the voice continued. “I need some money so that I can get something to eat. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’m very hungry.”
It wasn’t the usual affectless mumbling that Jacob and most city residents had adjusted their internal dials to ignore. It wasn’t the drone he’d heard a million times before, on sidewalks and street corners and in subway cars just like this. This man sounded really awful. This man sounded dead already.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I need your help. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I swear to God, I’m really scared, everybody. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Somehow Jacob felt the ugly twinge in the man’s tone. It wasn’t “I don’t know what I’m going to do to survive” but “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.” It wasn’t desperation to live; it was a fear of knowing the only options he had left. These weren’t the pleadings of a man just trying to make it to tomorrow. They were the quaking last words of a man headed for the nearest bridge unless he got a dollar. But Jacob’s wallet was empty. He didn’t even have a quarter. He’d spent his last ten on a bottle of cheap wine, which he and Pete had barely touched, and which Pete had emptied down the drain last night before sending the bottle shuddering down the trash chute. Jacob winced. If all he’d had were a hundred-dollar bill, he’d have given it to the man just to make him be quiet.
“Please,” the man begged, “I swear to God I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The doors opened at Third Avenue and Jacob moved toward the platform — it wasn’t his stop, but he didn’t care. He’d walk across the state to get away. As he got out onto the platform, he heard the doors closing behind him, and momentarily seized by some perverse imp, he turned to get a look at the man. His dark skin was powdered with some strange white grime. Jacob looked into his eyes. The worm snapped. The train pulled away from the station and left Jacob there. The lump in his throat had sunk deep down into his guts now, and he was sure it was never coming out.
4
The call had come just after lunch, thank God, as Irene knew there’d have been no keeping Sara from joining her for the appointment if she’d known about it. The gallery was closed for two weeks heading into the holidays, and so Irene had been wandering around the Village, getting lost in the nexus of Bleecker and Christopher Streets and Sixth and Seventh Avenues, ostensibly doing some holiday shopping. She’d already found nice leather boots for Sara, though Irene wasn’t going to tell her they had been purchased at the Pleasure Chest. At her favorite vintage store, Mel’s Secondhand Shop, she found, for George, a thermos with Einstein’s face on it that said REALITY IS MERELY AN ILLUSION, so that his coffee would stay warm on his way out to the observatory. She thought about William when she saw a scarf like the one Bob Dylan wore on the cover of Blonde on Blonde that she could see him in, that is, if she ever actually did see him again.