The Falconer

by Dana Czapnik

  She’s like, “Whoa, girl, want some coffee with your sugar?”

  I go, “I prefer it sweet.”

  “Salud!” she says, and we clink together our thin, misshapen metal spoons and dip them into our cups and stir. And the longer we sit there, the longer our giggles heat up, until eventually they boil over. All the tension from evading packs of marauding whiskey drinkers haunting the streets looking for a good time and girding ourselves against the frigid tundra that is Midtown Manhattan dissolves, and we die laughing.

  “Did you see . . . that guy . . . with the frosted . . . tips?” I manage to get out.

  “Yeah. He deserved to get punched for having that hair. Who does he think he is, Vanilla Ice? It’s about to be 1994.”

  “I feel bad about his face, though.”

  “Guys. Are. Fucked. Up.” Alexis shakes her head. “You don’t know because you don’t have brothers, but I know. Boys just want to hit things. That’s why there are always wars raging somewhere.”

  “You think if women ruled the world it’d be different?”

  “No question.”

  “So we’re more ethical by nature?”

  “It’s not ethics, it’s a . . . a tendency toward violence. My brother and I are the same age, we’ve had the same life, but Mateo comes home with bloody knuckles once a month.”

  “Maybe it’s just centuries of conditioning—boys are taught to be tough and not back down, and girls are taught to be sweet and nurturing.”

  “Nature or nurture, who cares? All I know is when a kid gets shot in my neighborhood for wearing some Nikes, it’s never a girl pulling the trigger.” She takes a sip of her hot chocolate, and a mustache forms above her lip, which she wipes away with the back of her hand.

  My coffee is still piping hot, so I blow on it. I watch a couple sitting at a table near ours. They’re wearing wedding rings—so they must be married—and old-school motorcycle jackets and jeans. The woman’s dark, shiny hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, and her face is grayish looking, her skin clinging to her bones so that one can easily imagine exactly what her skull looks like underneath. They’re not talking to each other. She’s just sipping her coffee, watching him do his crossword puzzle. I point them out to Alexis. “Look at those two over there,” I whisper. She watches them for a second. “You wanna make up a story?”

  Her face brightens. She takes a moment to collect her thoughts. “His name is . . . Octavio Wren,” she goes, all proud of herself.

  “Yes!” It’s a good name.

  “And he used to run a scam back in the day selling defective carburetors—”

  “To the Hell’s Angels!”

  “To the Hell’s Angels.” She nods, humoring me. “He met . . . Jean Weaver . . . working behind the counter in a pharmacy in Nevada . . . when he was on the run.”

  “Who stops in a pharmacy when they’re on the run from the Hell’s Angels? That’s how he ended up in a diner in Midtown on New Year’s. Making poor decisions like that.”

  “Well, he’s got this bad knee, see, from ’Nam and being on the road that long—the man just needed some aspirin. And then he saw Jean Weaver.”

  “Her eyes were the color of the sky after a rain.”

  “Nooo, Lucy, that’s too corny. You always make the stories too corny.”

  “Sorry, I’ll shut up. You tell it.” I zip my lip.

  “She had her dad’s Thunderbird in the back, and he was looking to ditch his bike and stretch out the old legs. He told her he was going to New York in search of anonymity and that feeling Joni Mitchell sings about in ‘Chelsea Morning.’ That’s all it took. She was hooked.”

  Jean Weaver puts the coffee cup down on a fork accidentally, and the coffee spills all down her shirt and pants, and the mug shatters on the floor. Geraldine rushes over to her with a few towels to clean herself off, and one of the busboys comes by and quickly mops up the scene. But Octavio Wren never looks up from his stupid puzzle. He keeps filling in letters like nothing happened. We wait to see if she gives him a look or says something like, “Are you gonna ask if I’m okay?” But she just quietly dries herself and sits back down in her chair and puts some cream in the new cup Geraldine’s brought her and settles into her seat and continues to stare, expressionless, at Octavio across from her, diligently doing his crossword.

  We look at each other. “Keep going?” I whisper to Alexis tentatively.

  She frowns. “Their money ran out by the time they got here. They squatted in buildings all over Hell’s Kitchen.” She squints her eyes as she watches them at their table. “She’s barren from a botched abortion. He’s been in and out of jail for twenty years for . . . larceny, assault, possession, selling to minors. They’re clean now and they like the feeling of a body in bed.” She takes a sip of her hot chocolate. “The end.”

  I slump on my side of the booth. “Uch, that’s so depressing. I liked it better when her eyes were the color of the sky after a rain.”

  “She’s got brown eyes, kid.” Steam circles her face.

  “I really hope you continue writing in college, Lex. I loved that poem you wrote for the literary magazine at school.”

  “I’ll write for fun if I have time, but you know I’m going premed in college.”

  “You keep saying that, but you don’t even like science.”

  “I liked bio, I just don’t love physics the way you do. Who was the one who dissected the frog in bio without a problem?”

  “I can’t hurt an animal. You know that.”

  “When I try to think of a job where you can make a really good living, and it’s something that everyone needs so it’s pretty secure, and it doesn’t require any kind of moral compromise, the only thing I can think of is medicine.”

  “You think every other profession is morally compromised?”

  “Not necessarily, but nothing is as pure as medicine. You save people’s lives and you make a ton of money while you’re doing it. It’s perfect.”

  “But you have to deal with blood and vomit. My dad makes a good living and he helps people.”

  “No offense, but I want to make way more money than your dad. Don’t get me wrong, anyone who makes an honest fucken’ peso in this world gets my respect, but you didn’t even have a Bat Mitzvah. I want, like, Rachel Epstein money. Her Bat Mitzvah was at the Copacabana, and she lives on Park Avenue. Have you ever been to her apartment?” I shake my head. “It’s insane.”

  “Her dad’s a plastic surgeon, though. Is that the kind of morally pure doctor you want to be?”

  “No. But I figure I can make enough money to have that lifestyle, but with a different address. I wouldn’t want to live on Park anyway. Too uptight.”

  “I was Bat Mitzvahed, by the way. I just didn’t get a party. My dad thinks the parties are inappropriate.”

  “Why? They’re like sweet sixteens or quinceañeras, just younger.”

  “Not really. The Bar Mitzvah marks the moment when the sins of the child are no longer the responsibility of the parent in the eyes of God. So the grown-ups rejoice because even if we become fucked-up people, they can still get into heaven. My dad thinks it’s sort of strange to celebrate that idea with hip-hop dancers at the Copacabana.”

  “But it was so fun. Don’t you wish you had one?”

  “At the time I did. But now I kind of see their point. A lot of those kids who had those parties are such assholes now. I look at the Abneys and all the rich kids we go to school with and I wonder if there’s something poisonous in having too much money.”

  “You only say that because you have enough to not have to think about it.” I raise my eyebrows and open my mouth, about to argue with her. Let her know my family doesn’t have as much as she thinks. But she’s right. I can’t walk into Bloomingdale’s and buy whatever I want or afford to go to any college I want without taking out a few loans, but I have enough that I don’t have to think about it on a daily basis. Or at all, really. Only when I’m confronted by people who have significantly more
or significantly less. And I guess that’s a luxury in itself. So I shut my mouth.

  * * *

  We order fries so we can stay longer. They come in a plastic mesh basket with a napkin and they taste like freezer burn, but we eat them anyway.

  “Lex, do you think people are mostly good or mostly bad?”

  “It’s not like that. People aren’t good or bad. People are self-interested—that’s how we’ve been programmed to survive as a species. Somos carnívoros, baby!” She shoves three fries in her mouth.

  “You know, you actually have a lot more in common with Percy than you think you do.”

  “I was wondering how long we were going to go without talking about him.” She rolls her eyes. “I have nothing in common with that kid.”

  “I mean, neither of you has faith in the human race.”

  “You do?”

  “I’d like to think most people care about others and want to live in a more peaceful world.”

  “Of course people want to live in a more peaceful world, but not at the cost of personal sacrifice. If I could promise you that everyone in Africa with AIDS could be cured if every person in the Western world chose to give up something simple, like . . . their air conditioners in the summer, how many people do you think would sign on that dotted line?”

  I don’t say anything because she’s right and I hate losing arguments when the winner of the argument has pointed out something that offends my sense of justice.

  She reaches across the table and pats my cheek. “It’s okay. AIDS can’t be cured with air conditioners.” She laughs. “The difference between me and Percy is that even though we generally think the world is fucked, I’m still nice to people.”

  “He’s nice to people.” I get all defensive for some reason.

  “No, he’s not. He is a total asshole to girls, and you know it.”

  “But that’s different.”

  “How? Girls are people, right?”

  “Yes, of course. But—”

  “Loose, can I be straight with you?”

  “Always.”

  “Percy is just like Mateo. Matty’s always in one of two modes with girls: chasing them or running away from them. That’s ’cause he only sees girls as two things: things he wants to fuck and things he doesn’t wanna fuck. Girls he doesn’t want to fuck are invisible, or they’re too pure, like librarians. But girls he wants to fuck, once he fucks ’em . . . they turn into the girl he just fucked. See what I’m saying?”

  “But I wasn’t invisible to him—we were best friends for almost all our lives. I wasn’t perfect. He didn’t idolize me like some girl on a pedestal. And I definitely wasn’t some girl he wanted to, like, hit and quit.”

  “I don’t know what you were to him before. But have you heard from him since?”

  “No.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just opens her hands and shrugs.

  Alexis says the reason she’s brutally honest is because she’s a Leo with a moon in Sagittarius and she can’t help her true nature, nor would she want to. I knew this from almost the first moment I met her, when she was one of the new kids at Pendleton. She walked into school that day with very uneven cornrows, as though she’d done them by herself in the mirror, and she had on a Don’t-mess-with-me face. Though the teachers in school welcomed her warmly and encouraged all the kids to introduce themselves to her, everyone ignored her and only talked to the other new kids, who were less intimidating. But there was something about her I was immediately drawn to. A raw fight in her, like I could tell she got to Pendleton totally on her own, by clawing her way there, and she didn’t care if anyone liked her. I observed her from a distance for about a week and added another notch to my hatred for the other girls in my class when they snickered about her messy, I-don’t-give-a-damn braids behind her back—those girls who could never understand what it is to have the kind of hair you always want to hide. One day at lunch she smacked her tray down on the table and sat down opposite me. “Ay, why are you always staring at me?” She was wearing a yellow ribbed tank top and khakis with a belt. And a gaudy gold necklace with her name, Alexis, in script and two pearls on either end and a huge gold cross with an actual tiny Jesus on it. She was an Amazon to me, like she’d been touched by adulthood and she was operating on a whole other level. She belonged on Broadway or in a music video or at the very least in high school. I got embarrassed, turned red, and tried to swallow my mouthful of spaghetti without choking. “I don’t stare at you.” “Don’t lie. I don’t trifle with posers.” The girls at the table next to us heard our conversation because Alexis was and always will be loud, and they started laughing at us openly and grotesquely. She whipped her head around, the tendons in her neck elongated so that she looked like the bust of some famous French aristocrat in a wing in the Louvre. “What’s so fucken’ funny?” The girls’ eyes practically bugged as their laughing instantly stopped, and they grumbled their “Geez, chill outs” into their sandwiches and Capri Suns as they turned back to face each other, rolling their eyes but obviously admonished and ashamed. I’ve always been more timid than Alexis and less confident, but in that moment, I managed the guts from I have no idea where to look her straight in the face and say, “I wanna be your friend.” She didn’t reveal any enthusiasm, though later I’d learn she’d been scoping me, too. “What’s your sign?” she asked. “I dunno.” “How do you not know that? That’s like the most important—never mind. What’s your birthday?” “July thirtieth.” “You’re a Leo, just like me. I’m August third.” “My basketball number is three.” And then she took a big bite of a meatball. The red sauce that didn’t fit into her mouth coated the outline of her lips. “Yeah. Okay. We can be friends.”

  She spent that whole year schooling me in all the hip-hop I didn’t know. We’d go to Chinatown to buy bootleg albums and we’d fast-forward to the songs with sexually explicit lyrics, which we’d listen to with the volume way down so no one else could hear as we held both speakers of the headphones from my Walkman against our ears on bus rides during field trips and subway rides to the library for research projects. I taught her how to hit trick shots in basketball and how to hock loogies from my roof onto cars—one point for silver cars, two points for red cars, three points for brown cars. Winner gets nothing but the thrill of winning. She’d sleep over my house and we’d watch the Knicks and The Simpsons and Rap City and Yo! MTV Raps and try to replicate the dance moves in the videos in my living room. She’d borrow books and records from my parents’ shelves, fascinated for some reason by their collection of folk music, maybe because we always want the things we didn’t grow up with.

  If Alexis had been anyone else that first day we became friends. If she had been a little more poised. Polished. More pouty or precocious. If she had straight hair and smiled more and was sweeter, surely someone would have pulled her off to the side and let her know that being my friend was social suicide and she shouldn’t take me up on my offer if she knew what was good for her. But she wasn’t any of those things. She was rabid and brilliant, with an intimidating exterior that was clearly a shield. And even if someone had enough guts to breach her fortress, she’s a morally sound person and she would have shot them down. So I’ve known from the very beginning that Alexis doesn’t care about saying stuff to spare my feelings, which means if she tells me something good, I know it’s true.

  * * *

  I’ve got one sip of coffee at the bottom of my cup, and I swallow it. It’s cold and syrupy. “You make him sound like a monster.”

  “He is a monster. He’s been a dick to every girl he’s ever encountered. Such an odd kid—all these philosophical ideas and still a total shit to anyone with an extra X chromosome. Can’t see his own shortcomings. Only the shortcomings of society.”

  “He’s complicated. That’s what I like about him.”

  “That’s just a nice way of saying he’s an asshole. Why is it always rich white guys who are nihilists, anyway? Like, what do they have to be angry about? Their pe
nthouses are too dusty?”

  “The thing about Percy you have to understand is that his parents went through an awful divorce.”

  “So? So did everybody’s.”

  “Yeah, but theirs was on Page Six every day for like a month.”

  “That’s just ’cause they got money. The only people who ever complain and are taken seriously are poor little rich kids. How can you still defend him anyway? He hurt you.”

  “Because I love him,” I say, as pathetically as a person can say a thing like that.

  She shakes her head, and her earrings crash against her neck. “You don’t love him. You have a crush, and they’re called crushes because they’re supposed to hurt.”

  “Oh, Lex, what I got is way worse than a crush.”

  She sits back in the diner booth. Puts her hands together under her chin. “Mmm. I’ve long suspected it, but now I know it’s true . . . Tienes añoranza. Real bad.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s no English equivalent. It’s like . . . missing a place you can’t go back to. Like leaving a guy who you constantly fought with, but damn, the way he looked at you . . . you’ll never feel eyes like that again. Anyone who has ever left a country behind to come here knows that feeling. You had to leave, you can’t ever go back, it was terrible . . . but you miss it.” She squeezes her eyes shut and pounds her heart with her fist. “You’ve got añoranza, Loose. The difference is that the person you think you love never really existed. Now that the reality of who he is has been revealed to you, from now on, when you miss him, you’ll only be missing the dream of him. I don’t know a word for that in any language.”

  “Like . . . nostalgia for an imagined moment.” I sigh. “The English language is so inadequate.”

  “It’s because there’s not enough sadness in English-speaking countries. They’ve always been the colonizers, the oppressors. How can anyone be expected to create a language of the soul when they have no soul of their own to understand?” She takes the last sip of her hot chocolate. “You want more coffee?”