by K. Chess
“One-hundred-fourteenth Precinct station house,” the officer provided.
“At the 114th Precinct. In Queens. Thank you.” What could it hurt to be polite, at this point? She hung up the receiver.
“You can make another call if you want,” the officer told her. “Most people don’t know this, but you can actually make three.”
“No thanks,” Hel said and the officer, shrugging, led her back to the holding cell.
Only one other person inside, an older woman in heeled boots, tight jeans, and a sweater patterned with snowflakes, who lay down with her head to the cinder-block wall, taking up the entire bench. Her face showed all the signs of a serious dross smoker. Or whatever it was desperate people smoked here instead.
The door clanged shut, locking Hel in. Without opening her eyes, the other woman drew her knees up to make room. Hel sat down in the space she’d vacated. “Thank you.”
She could see the drosshead’s chest rise in a sudden breath, could see her eyes flick beneath her lashes, but the woman didn’t speak.
If Donaldson were dead, she wouldn’t do all the things she was meant to do, whatever those things were. Her absence would change the course of the world—in some unknowable way, small and insignificant or large and far-reaching—change this world to which Hel had now reluctantly and accidentally committed herself. Here, they called that the butterfly effect.
The butterfly effect. Beautiful.
But where was The Pyronauts?
Vikram listened to the ring, waiting for Hel to pick up. The stubborn part of him that resented being the first to back down from their standoff had been fully overpowered by the part of him that was very, very excited. He knew she would be, too. He had to share that feeling.
He knelt on the floor of the big bedroom in front of it. The Shipwreck.
Together, he and Dwayne had dragged boxes, parcels, bags, and loose items into the upstairs hallway, tunneling through the hoarded junk to reach the wall where Dwayne guessed the painting had once hung. The camping lantern illuminated the stuff in their way. Piles of paperbacks. Folded quilts and blankets and a musty, sweat-stained pillow. A massive stack of plastic containers printed with the logos of different brands of yogurt, sour cream, and margarine, all ten years old, Dwayne said, all washed out and nested inside one another as if ready to be reused. Then, more framed art: a map of the London subway system, a midcentury depiction of a Native warrior slumped on a horse with an arrow protruding from his back. A framed cork bulletin board.
Finally, a glint of gold—the edge of the frame Dwayne had described—and the few leftmost inches of dusty canvas. Sea and sky. The broad brushstrokes with which Lowery had rendered the matte, bluish-white prismatic surfaces of the iceberg, sheaves of dirty ice.
The thrill of dread Vikram felt when he pulled the final things away made him think of what it might be like to be called into the office of the medical examiner to identify the damaged corpse of a long-lost loved one. Even if you couldn’t see the face, you could tell. You could tell just from the tiniest details. The shape of a kneecap or the faint hairs on the knuckles. A scar from an old burn. The bitten-down fingernails.
Yes. This was it.
“OK. It’s confirmed,” Vikram told Dwayne. “I can dig it out the rest of the way in the morning, when it’s brighter in here.”
“You working tonight, man?”
“No, I’ve got two days off. I’m just going to hang out here. Look through some of these National Geographics. You should get home to Eden, I guess.”
“I feel kind of bad for you,” Dwayne said, as he put on his coat. “This the city that never sleeps, you know. You should go catch a movie or something. Go to a club.”
“Nah, I’ll be fine here.”
But once Vikram was alone, he felt lonesome. From his place on the air mattress, he watched the hours turn on his watch to bad luck time and beyond, too keyed up to concentrate on the photo essay about the Padaung women of Burma. He found himself back in the room with the painting. He crouched, worshipful.
He thought he’d lost the capacity to feel this way.
He was no art historian—anybody looking closely would see what he saw, that this was no reproduction. He could make out the texture of the surface, how the artist had worked up layers of pigment to produce the luminescent clouds. It didn’t take an expert to note the lamentable damage inflicted by neglect, the fine cracks in the paint.
Vikram thought back to that morning fifteen years ago in the Sleight Museum with his vanished friends. The rival, the flatmate, the tour guide, the woman: all of them out of reach now. But being here and seeing the painting brought them back.
He’d climbed to the second floor with the woman he’d loved, watching her movements. Vikram remembered what she’d been wearing, the wide-legged trousers cut from a draping fabric, wet below the knees where the cloth had wicked up water as they walked in the rain. She climbed the stairs, and he followed. Down below, the others left behind in the kitchen exclaimed audibly over an empty tin, long stored in one of the cabinets and produced with a flourish by their guide. “This was Sleight’s favorite brand of tea.” And he’d trailed the young woman down the hallway to the big bedroom—to this very room—and there kissed her in secret. She’d kissed him back.
Had the painting hung behind them, then? No. Vikram knew for a fact that The Shipwreck was accounted for in the other world, on display in a Canadian museum’s collection. It had never been missing. Still, to check, he put a floor underneath his young self and his companion, erected sloping walls around them, papered them with shabby wallpaper. His mind’s eye had to invent the detail of the pattern.
What else, what else had been in the room? Try as he might, he couldn’t see anything but the down of a soft cheek, out of focus, a tendril of hair that touched him.
A skill, not remembering, one he’d cultivated. After all, holding on taxes you. You do it for a while, but eventually, you choose to stop working so hard. Drowning—drowning that part of you—begins to seem preferable to fighting.
He had no idea what might have hung on the wall in Sleight’s bedroom.
Not this painting though.
He couldn’t explain how it got here. And Hel wasn’t picking up to have the miracle revealed to her. The tone echoed in Vikram’s ear. Impatient, he ended the call and dialed again.
On his visit in the other world, this had been a place of preservation, a place one went to see things that had been deemed worthy of study and protection. A sturdy gate placed in the doorway of this room, like others in the cottage, kept visitors from entering Sleight’s boudoir with their grabbing hands and dirty shoes, and so he’d bent the girl back over the barrier, bracing one hand on the sloping wall—a touch more forbidden than the way he touched her body—and they’d kissed breathlessly. He’d smelled her perfume, a pungent and musky scent, reminiscent of dead leaves. It had seemed to him then like a scent an older woman might wear, a dowager, rich and worldly. A smell from across a boundary.
He remembered the perfume, the trousers, the spring in her step, and the coil of hair, but not her name. It was lost at sea. And it didn’t matter.
Hel still wasn’t answering. Vikram put down his phone and used both hands to clear away more of the junk. Shoe boxes heavy with unknown contents. A lamp, its cast-resin base shaped like a shepherd girl, the shade badly dented. A cardboard box with a bird’s nest inside. Dishes wrapped in yellowing newsprint. A small dusty cabinet of dark wood—some piece of music-playing equipment, a speaker or amplifier. He pushed them all away from the painting or picked them up and moved them behind him, careful not to touch the surface of the canvas, careful not to cause a collapse. He was blocking himself in, he realized, sealing the tunnel he’d created earlier and burying himself with The Shipwreck.
To whom did the painting belong?
Dwayne didn’t know which of his people had first inhabited this house, but he’d mentioned his great-grandmother, his mother’s mother’s mother. All
owing twenty-five years per generation, that put them close to the beginning of the twentieth century, a decade or two into After. How much further back did they go? And how had the painting gotten here from Sleight’s school? Who was its legal owner?
“What do you want me to do?” Vikram asked Dwayne, when they uncovered the first corner of the canvas, enough to confirm his suspicions. “This has been in your family—”
“Does me no good hidden away up here,” Dwayne said. “People ought to be looking at it, if you think it’s that important.”
Figure it out. He wanted to. He pulled away one last overstuffed garbage bag.
Now, he’d fully exposed it, every square inch. He backed up—as much as he could in the maze he’d created—to take in the most important element of the composition. At the bottom center of the canvas, just below the foundering ship, grasped the white arm and hand Sleight wrote about, the sailor who had so terrified Sleight and Dwayne as boys, reaching up blindly from the water for a coil of rope he would never find.
The color plate Vikram pored over in an old book, the image translated to pixels on the screen of an ordinator—neither did justice to the experience of being right here with the painting. He stretched out his own hand, extending his forefinger, but he didn’t touch, knowing the oils of his skin might damage the fragile surface.
The arm was painted small, really—an inch and a half long, perhaps—and Lowery had chosen a ghastly blue overlay for the flesh, only a few shades lighter than the roiling waves. The foreground of that vast ocean nearly swallowed up the sailor’s signal for help, an arrangement that emphasized the unseen man’s centrality and his insignificance at the same time.
It would be cold in that water.
With his phone, Vikram snapped a picture and texted it to Hel. Surely, she would call him now. She would tell him what to do about this.
Close to dawn, too overwhelmed to dig himself out, he slept in the sea of Mrs. Defoe’s collections, his head pillowed on a stuffed toy, an orange bear someone—he imagined Shawn Sealy—might have won for her at Coney Island, if the carnival park were still there. Vikram was not used to sleeping at night and his dreams were uneasy ones, obsessive in their repetition. He was walking on a dark beach, making for a point of land that never seemed to get any closer, his calves aching, his feet sinking into the sand. Sometimes a stranger pursued him and other times he was the one in pursuit, following a dim figure he could make out ahead only intermittently. When he woke with a crick in his neck and a sore hip, he found the solidity of the bare floorboards to be a relief. He reached for his phone.
Midafternoon already. How had that happened?
Still no missed calls, no texts. He tried Hel’s number yet again. No answer. The call went straight to voicemail, as if she hadn’t charged her phone. That wasn’t like her. They had no home phone at the Bronx apartment. What else?
He called Oliveira. No answer there either.
The assistant at the museum who’d been helping Hel. He remembered the name, Teresa something. Vikram didn’t have her number, but he knew where she worked. Maybe Dwayne would give him a ride over to MoMT on his way to Williamsburg.
He went downstairs, walked around the echoing rooms of the cottage. Normally, Dwayne came to clean in the mornings, but there was no sign of him today. Had he gone in for an early shift? Maybe he could get Wes to run him over. Then he remembered that it was Wednesday. Wes would be at Reintegration Education now, where he should be.
He was late.
After a few hours in the brightly lit cell, Hel drifted off. She slumped on the very edge of the metal bench, Vikram’s parka pulled tight around her. At some point, she heard the cell door open to admit a third arrestee—an impossibly young-looking prostitute with a tear-streaked face—but Hel had run out of sympathy, and did not stir or speak to the new arrival or give up her spot. Some time later, officers loaded the three women and all the men from the holding cell down the hall into a van, which would bring them to Queens Central Booking for arraignment. Hel followed her arresting officer out the station house door, shuffling so as not to lose a shoe. They’d taken away her laces. The sky outside: still black.
The drosshead in the snowflake sweater cupped her hands around her eyes and looked through the grille and out the windshield of the van—as if trying to keep track of the route the speeding van was taking. “Ya estoy,” she whispered softly to herself. “Otra vez.”
They had her now. Hel rotated her wrists inside the cuffs, which were not uncomfortably tight, but certainly tight enough to hold her. They had her now; it had just taken them longer than she’d expected.
After the mother with the baby and the small boys left the site at Calvary, the entry group consisted of Hel and ninety-eight strangers. None of them talked as they stood where they’d been placed by the evac personnel, watching the small team of technicians in rubber jumpsuits working to expand the dormant Gate for passage. They weren’t the first group; they knew that by now, whatever waited on the other side must be expecting them. Hel had looked into the shimmer and prepared for two very obvious possibilities, which no one in charge of the evacuation effort had spoken aloud. First: that this other world might be damaged worse than the one they were leaving. Second: that if it wasn’t, its inhabitants might be ready to defend it from encroachment with whatever weapons they had.
Hel prepared herself for gas, for lasers, for bullets, for electric charge.
It was common sense. It was human nature.
She and the others weren’t required to hold hands, but as soon as the countdown started, someone grabbed Hel’s and she squeezed back hard—half comfort and half punishment—and a thought came to her, as they all stepped forward together: This could be the last person I touch before I die.
That blaze of lights that blinded them, in the other Calvary, her first memory of a new world. Floodlights, and the sudden noise of a crowd. A beating thump that she learned later was the sound of helicopter rotors up above. The odd uniforms of the police and military units all around them, the news cameras rolling, a hectic welcoming committee.
But no chemical cloud, no machine-gun fire. No hoods, no handcuffs, not then, not yet. Just a voice, amplified by some mysterious means. “Drop your bags and step to the side,” the voice told them. “Please step to the side. Hands on your heads, folks. Each of you will be patted down. Hands on your heads. Welcome to New York.”
Nearly three years had passed. Two years and eight months. She’d stopped counting the days. And they’d been keeping an eye on her ever since.
Inside the court building in Queens, there was more paperwork, more waiting, though it seemed that whenever a new officer saw the UDP mark in her file, a restrained sort of hurry, a subdued excitement, ensued. After they moved her for the third time to a third bench, Hel found herself sandwiched between the baby prostitute from the holding cell at the 114th Precinct and a tall woman with thick black hair who confided to Hel that she’d recently undergone gender reassignment surgery in Thailand—“the whole shebang”—but that her ID still classified her as a man. She’d been held in lockup with male prisoners. “I mean, luckily, all those guys in there were real gentlemen about it,” she said. “Luckily! God, I can’t believe I was so dumb! My ex told me to get my license changed, but I was like, why bother—it’s not like I even drive in this city.”
A rumpled but handsome young man called Hel’s name, and she came to attention. Standing before her, he sorted through a stack of folders. Her public defender. That meant Vikram either still hadn’t heard about her arrest or didn’t care. “How are you going to plead?” he asked, leading her to a booth just outside the holding area.
She’d already decided not to speak, no matter what, so she shrugged mutely.
“Look, my job is to defend you, but I need you to help me out. It looks like you violated a restraining order, that’s a charge of Criminal Contempt in the first degree. A class-E felony. And as you know, they took a four-inch gravity knife off of you. Th
ey’ll probably go for Stalking in the second degree, plus Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the fourth.”
“But I wasn’t—” she said, startled out of her resolution. “That’s for protection! I always carry it.”
Around the corner, out of sight but still in earshot, the whole-shebang woman whistled. “Damn, mamí!”
“You’re gonna want to plead to Stalking in the third, if I can swing it with the ADA. Get you one year in jail, with post-release supervision. Not a bad deal, for someone like you.”
“What? No! I’m not guilty. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The lawyer shrugged. “All right, then. Your funeral. Come on, they’re calling your docket number.”
Inside the small courtroom, dim and stifling with dry radiator heat, a judge, a clerk, some kind of stick—a bailiff, maybe—and a second suit sat waiting for them. The prosecuting attorney. Hel listened numbly as her lawyer waived the formal reading of the charges against her. She listened as the prosecutor argued that her lack of employment and lack of ties to the community made her a flight risk despite her previously clean record. He mentioned the antisocial tendencies typical of UDPs, stopping just short of referring to Joslan Micallef by name. Hel’s attorney attempted to argue that since Hel reliably presented herself at Reintegration Education classes and since she was prohibited by law from changing her residence without approval anyway, she’d have nowhere to flee, but the judge set bail.
Her attorney bargained the initial figure down to some slightly lower amount, which she still couldn’t pay, and it was all over.
They left the courtroom. Hel felt exhausted. Did any of her associates have that kind of money? the attorney wanted to know. Did she know anyone who owned property? She didn’t answer him, and after a minute, he left her in peace, taking her folder along with him.
