by K. Chess
So I quit the liquor store and my Adjustment Counselor got me a janitor job at a factory that made parody masks of politicians I’d never heard of. That’s where I met Ari; he was at the end of the line, daubing color on the apples of Clinton’s rubber cheeks, giving them that touch of life. I was still half in mourning for Bronson, but I couldn’t keep from noticing him. Ari would never talk to me, though. When I said hello, he ignored me. If I smiled at him, he turned away. I thought maybe I was going about things wrong. I had trouble telling which guys were verts when the styles were so different. So I gave up. One day, though, Ari stayed late while I was sweeping up. He told me that both of his grandparents on his mother’s side and all their siblings in Polithuania, in Vilnius, had been gassed in vans or machine-gunned in the woods. The swastika wasn’t cool, he said. It was nothing to play around with.
I told him who I was, how and why I got the mark. I told him about myself at twenty-one, sitting in the red leather chair in the downtown burner studio, saying, “Here’s the design I want.” I told him about luck. I told him about free throws. I told him about eternity. His family had suffered directly, and yet he was the first non-UDP besides PO Goncalves who’d ever listened all the way through. And while Ari listened, I knew that I was finished. It couldn’t wait till I saved up the money for a professional removal. It was time to be rid of it.
We went back to his apartment together, stopping on the way at a Rite Aid for antiseptic and bandages and tape and cellophane, then at a hardware store for a soldering iron. The bottle of vodka, he already had.
“Are you sure about this?” Ari asked, the hot iron in his hand. At that point, I guess he had started to feel a little sorry for coming down on me so hard.
I told him I was a Buddhist, and that after all, life is suffering.
Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why it bothered me, having to tell those strangers about being marked against my will in lockup. I couldn’t stand the pity, that was it, when in fact it was something I chose myself, something I used to be proud of. I couldn’t stand people thinking they knew something tragic about me when what they knew was all wrong.
There actually was a fire in my aunt’s township that year I got the poison ivy. A family lost their house and all their possessions, and the baby died of smoke inhalation, and the little boy was indeed very badly burned. Turned out the fire was the boy’s fault. He’d been playing with matches.
I wonder about him, sometimes. I wonder what questions strangers asked him, all the rest of his life, when they saw his scars.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Vikram first visited the Sleight House Museum on a slow Sunday afternoon in the other world. He’d come down from Boston for the weekend expressly for this purpose with two other university students from the literature department—one a rival of his, one a woman he loved—as well as his flatmate, a well-read economist who happened to be a passionate science fiction devotee and had begged Vikram to let him come along. They arrived at New Grand Central and traveled to eastern Brooklyn by bus and velocab. They passed apartment blocks and shops and friendly 1940s-era concrete public buildings: a library, a community child-care center. Brownsville—this Brownsville—was a racially mixed working-class area where people kept their chrome railings shiny and maintained geraniums in pots on their stoops. The cabs dropped them at Sleight Park, a square of green across the avenue from a Moorish Revival synagogue. After paying their respects at the bust of the great writer, they walked the last few blocks to his house. It would have been pleasant if not for the deluge of rain that suddenly caught them, curtains of water sweeping down the street, pooling around dams of leaves in the drains. The economist shared his umbrella with the woman student; Vikram and his rival were both soaked by the time they got to the address. For this reason, Vikram had no clear memory of what the exterior of the cottage looked like then. Clean white shingles and a green door with a brass handle, that was what he knew, and the feel of his cold shirt clinging to him and the worry that the dark hair on his chest was showing through.
Here, that door—the very same door!—was flaking brown paint, exposing splintered wood beneath. He’d spent a long time lingering on the steps after ringing the bell, so long he’d begun to wonder how much longer, given the dubious character of the neighborhood, it would be safe to wait, when a young man finally came staggering out with a bulky load in his arms—a box made of dark gray plastic with a dangling cord that threatened to trip him up. He kicked the door closed behind him before Vikram could get even a glimpse of what was inside.
This must be the owner Hel had mentioned. The kid.
“Hello. I’m Vikram Bhatnagar, Mr. Sealy.”
“Dwayne is fine.” He put down what he was carrying and took Vikram’s proffered hand, looking like he was wondering what Vikram was even doing here.
Last time, there had been a guide, an unpaid intern from New Lots College who led them from the sitting room to the office, then to the half bath with its chipped pedestal sink and modest bidet. Initially morose, she seemed to warm to their group, growing more and more animated and departing from her usual script. Clear plastic barriers at hip height blocked entrance to the rooms proper, but the guide retrieved a screwdriver from somewhere and unscrewed the barrier from the doorframe in order to admit them to the kitchen, where Sleight, in fact, had done his real writing, over at the table by the stove. Sleight in a hurry, still in his wet overcoat, clothes and beard steaming as pen scratched paper.
They’d entered the rooms reverently, walked across linoleum Sleight had trodden. Indecipherable notes the man had scribbled to himself stood out on the molding. Vikram had touched them, though he’d known he shouldn’t, with an outstretched forefinger.
“Where’s the estate agent?” Vikram asked now. “The realtor. Will she meet us here?”
Dwayne didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. “There is no . . . look, you can’t go in there right now.”
“But the woman I talked to on the phone said you were doing showings today. That you could fit me in, maybe, at four.” The suggestion that the place was in demand had been welcome news. Vikram had imagined eager home-buyers with actual money who would snatch the place out from under Hel. Problem solved. Of course, that was before he saw the condition of the poor cottage, its sagging porch, its unlovable shuttered windows like black eyes. “I thought she was the estate agent.”
“Eden?” Dwayne said with a laugh. “Shit. Eden’s my girl. Not no realtor. I left my phone at her place, I guess. I don’t know what she’s playing at. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad you’re interested—but the place is not ready. I can take your info if you want, give you a call when the junk is cleared out?” He stood there for a moment, waiting, and then, when Vikram did not respond, he picked up the appliance again and began to shuffle toward the edge of the porch. A paper note flapped, taped to the front of whatever it was, hand-lettered. The crooked words read FREE—WORKS.
“Hold on,” Vikram said. “You need me to take a side of that?”
Dwayne turned. “Nah, man. I got it.”
Vikram found himself picking up the trailing cord, just to get it out of the guy’s way. He followed him down the three shallow steps, down the path to the street, like the maid of honor holding a bride’s train. “What is it, anyway?”
“Old tube TV. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. I tried to sell it on craigslist, but nobody wants it.” He staggered, hugging the TV to his body with long skinny arms.
Growing up in the dangerous Jersey suburbs, Vikram had known guys like him—the baby of his tough family, a soft guy from a killer block. “What’s craigslist?”
“What you mean? Are you another one of these . . . like that lady that came to see me?”
“Yeah. I’m another one of those.”
“So, this place is pretty important to you?” Dwayne asked, dropping the television on the curb with a muffled bang. He adjusted the note, which had gotten wrinkled in its journey from
the house. “Lady said it was some important writer’s house.”
Important. Work like The Pyronauts, ill bound between paper covers and sold for dimes to people who didn’t know better, to dreamers and newcomers, paupers and children. Work like that explored realms of possibility, Vikram thought; not what was past and could not be undone, but an improbable future from which humanity was obliged to try to learn. Not that which seemed most likely to happen, but that which could teach readers the most about themselves.
He’d spent long hours at work last night in Jamaica thinking about it, alone in the guard shack as he watched the face of the old factory building, waiting for a message to light up for him on the broad brick side. He did his tours every hour on the hour and there was nothing to see in the corridors or in the fire stairs, no fear, this time, to keep him company. Disappointed—that was how he felt. And yet, if the timer explanation had been the right one, wouldn’t the same storage space have lit up again at the same hour? It hadn’t. All remained dark. As long as he watched, as long as nothing happened, possibilities existed, and the memory of the night before made his job seem less like a job and more like a vigil. Got him thinking about ghosts.
But there were no ghosts in this house. Or not ones he knew.
“Yes,” Vikram confirmed. “A famous man who never lived. So don’t start thinking you’re sitting on a gold mine or something. Most of us wouldn’t care. There’s not even that many who had the chance to care. And some of us are dead by now.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I’m here for Helen.”
Dwayne walked back up to the porch and leaned casually against one of its supports. “She your friend? Your wife?”
“We’re not married. But basically.” Vikram stayed on the bottom step. He wanted to go inside, but he didn’t want to ask and be refused. He didn’t want to feel this curiosity about what might have endured the different years. Not the precious scrawl on the baseboards and the window frame, of course, but the kitchen table itself? The framed lithographs of partridges in the hallway and the old ornate radiators? It wasn’t Sleight’s history but his own, his twenty-four-year-old self, the incandescent excitement he’d felt, the contagious wonder. That was one reason for coming here today. The other was some half-formed desire to set Dwayne Sealy straight—to warn him that Hel had no money, that she was wasting his time, that she was obsessed in a way that was starting to make Vikram uncomfortable. To thwart Hel, to outmaneuver her, since she wouldn’t listen to reason. Now that he was actually here, though, to do so seemed shameful, traitorous. “Did she tell you what she wanted to do with the place?”
“She didn’t say, but I didn’t think she wanted it for the view or the neighbors.”
Vikram stared at the door. Where the newer paint had flaked, the old was visible. Green. Incredible.
He could imagine it easily here. A way back to the past.
It was midmorning when Hel finally spotted Donaldson emerging from the direction of the parking area into the sunny landscaped space that separated the old Domino Sugar refinery buildings from the modern residential towers across the way. She’d been waiting since dawn outside the leasing office. Newly planted bushes provided an imperfect screen; she’d had to sit on the ground to remain unseen and her legs were stiff and cramped when she stood.
“I have to have it back,” Hel said, pushing through the shrubbery.
Donaldson’s clothes were elegant, as always, but in her hand, she held an insulated plastic coffee cup with a cartoon cat on it. “You need what back?” She did not look even remotely startled by Hel’s presence. But why would she be startled? She must have been expecting this.
“My book. The Sleight book, the one I showed you. If you’re not going to work with me, I need it back.”
“I don’t have it.”
Hel felt a thrill of panic; she hadn’t expected staunch denial. “Yes, you do. I left it with you.”
“Why would you have done that? That book must be priceless to you. You hardly know me.”
Hel could envision it: The Pyronauts. That night at the party, the way she’d opened it to the title page and then to the table of contents. The pebbled texture of the paper, its brittle frangibility. Priceless, indeed. Donaldson and her wife and that other shitfoot with the braying laugh who’d been nearby, all of them bending their heads together to peer at it.
Many times over the past two years, in bed with the book in the Bronx while Vikram was at work, she had buried her nose in the spine. The scent of stale paper and ink would come to her then, as neutral as the body odor of a loved one. Age, faint acidity, dust. Reminiscent to her of nights studying medical texts in a basement carrel all those years ago. She could taste the book. She could feel its weight in her hand. Its worth.
Hel had difficulty sequencing. She knew other UDPs who had the same problem. In moments of panic or excitement, single impressions came back, shorn of sense-making context. Later, she couldn’t always rely on her memory of the order in which events had occurred. But she remembered the suspended party. The hotel that shouldn’t have been.
The expanse of pale wood, a dance floor hovering in air. The faceless serving staff in attendance moving around the periphery of the crowd. In her memory, the guests came together and drifted apart as in some choreographed dance out of a historical film, the kind of dance not popular in Hel’s world or in this one for at least two hundred years. Strange men in collared shirts, narrow trousers, bright ties scattered here and there around the necks of the most conservative. No hats. Women in dresses with plunging necklines and floating hems; women held down only by the substantial jewelry in their lobes and at their wrists. All of them whirled at the center of Hel’s memory, moving toward their partners.
And her own somber dress. Her stupid bag digging into her shoulder. Steps she didn’t know, and the taste of peaches in her mouth.
That wasn’t how it happened. The dancing didn’t happen. But the feeling was right. And righter still was this firm memory: held in Donaldson’s long-fingered hands, the paperback. Blue cover.
“You looked through it. I saw you,” Hel said, brought back to the present moment by the breeze tossing the leaves of the manicured baby trees around them.
“I did,” Donaldson admitted. “And then I put it down.”
“No. I saw you take it away.”
Had she? She’d wanted to give Donaldson a chance to look at it in detail: the verso and the number line showing the print run. To examine how it was bound and search its pages for familiar passages and come up short. Hel didn’t remember a conversation about these intentions. But Donaldson walked off the dance floor with The Pyronauts in her grip. Of that, Hel was certain. The hand. The book cover. The hand on the cover. It was as clear to her as the smell. Clear as Jonas’s smell. Clear as anything.
A scattering of sunlight shifted at her feet, one coin of illumination settling on Donaldson’s brown forehead, like a sniper’s laser sight. Hel could smell her smoky perfume. “Call the hotel,” Donaldson advised. “Maybe they picked it up. I don’t have it.”
Donaldson moved away but Hel remained. She sat down on a granite bench, cold beneath her tights, and looked at the decorative native grasses planted around the paths, the same grasses that would have grown in a marshy place like this centuries Before when the land belonged to the Lenape and Mohegan in every possible New York she could imagine.
Time passed, some amount of time Hel couldn’t measure, and she felt cold, and saw that someone’s shadow had blocked the sun. It was Teresa Klay standing in front of her, one hand on her cocked hip, the other by her side, the call screen on her cell phone glowing. Who had sent her—Donaldson or the leasing office people? It didn’t matter.
“Hel,” Klay said. “Go home, will you?”
“I can’t.”
Klay put the phone away and sat next to her. After a minute, she tentatively raised her arm and looped it around Hel’s shoulder. Hel felt herself stiffen at the unexpected
contact.
Klay muttered sympathetic words. “That’s too bad. That’s too bad.” It did not have the ring of a taunt. She sounded like she meant it.
What was it like?
Helen was ten. Her mom was gone and her dad wasn’t around—he was getting paid double for back-to-back overnight runs, which he took whenever he could get them—so her sister, Persephone, was left in charge. That was the year the three of them lived in an apartment over an osteopath’s office in East Harlem—what would turn out to be the last Manhattan apartment. Their dad slept on the foldout couch so Seff and Helen could share the only bedroom.
Seff, who was sixteen, wanted a party. She wanted Helen gone for the evening, like their dad. “Don’t you have a friend’s house you can go to or something?”
“I don’t have any friends,” Helen said. “Anyway, I think I’m coming down with something.” She hoped Seff would feel her forehead.
“You usually have one friend,” Seff pointed out.
This was true. Since their mother left, they’d lived in half a dozen neighborhoods in four out of the five boroughs. Helen didn’t fit in too well at any of the schools, but typically she had it in her to find a girl in her new class whom no one else liked much, discover something she had in common with that girl, and form a bond of mutual protection. That hadn’t happened in Harlem yet. They’d moved in here only a month ago, but Seff was already popular.
“I don’t have even one friend. And I’m sick.”
“You’re not sick.”
