Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  The train slowed as it neared the Forty-second Street stop and I turned my attention back to the mother and daughter across the aisle. The mother put away the crayons with the care of someone who knows to the penny what they cost and then stood up. The coloring book, I saw, featured cartoon figures known to all children and licensed by the animated entertainment subdivision of the film division of the Corporation. The mother pulled her coat around her shoulders, still talking in a low voice to her daughter, while down the car the old woman raved: “. . . children around the world bin killed ever-day and nobody care except the Lord! You! And your She pointed a fat gloved finger at several commuters reading their papers or staring out the windows at the dark tunnel blurring past. “You be standin’ by while the little children of God are being killed by sin and wickedness!”

  “Shut yo mouth, old woman!” came the same heckling voice again, this time angry and fast.

  “If your momma had shut her legs when you was being born,” the woman responded, “then you would have died, sinner!” She resumed her transit toward my end of the car, muttering damnation and putrefaction under her breath. She passed the young woman and her daughter without incident; perhaps they did not appear as sinners in her eyes. But before heading out the door to the next car, she let her manic, accusatory attention rest on me. Her eyes boiled with crazed dark righteousness—You ’specially wicked and don’t you think I don’t know it they seemed to shoot, and I felt an odd fear, staring into the bright black face furrowed in judgment.

  The train cleared the subway tunnel and slowed past the many waiting people on the platform. The woman gathered her daughter’s hand and I felt a sudden, inexplicable anxiety that I was never going to see them again. I jumped up. “Excuse me,” I blurted. “I noticed—” The subway car lurched and I did a broken dance step. “I noticed that you might need something—”

  “Yes?” the woman answered in a clear, self-possessed voice. “What do you think I need?”

  “Well—a job, maybe?” I stayed several feet away, in order that she not smell the drink on my breath. The woman’s eyes moved over me appraisingly, as if despite my suit and overcoat and fine leather shoes, I might be yet another urban madman, pressing specious friendship upon her. Other than that, I was merely some white guy going soft in the belly. “I thought maybe you might need work,” I stumbled on, “and I wondered if I could be of help. I work for a large company . . .” I fished into my wallet and found an embossed business card, with the famous logo of the Corporation most prominent. “Here.” By now, people were staring at me with the guarded, what-now interest New Yorkers reserve for beggars, con men, and incompetent subway musicians. Meanwhile the brakes of the train screamed and the conductor’s voice, dismantled by static into a protohuman chatter, blasted over the intercom: Forty-second Street change herefor thenumber onelocal, numbernine, RandNtrains, steplively whenexiting the train, watch your step letthemoff please, letthemoff.

  “Here, take it.” I leaned forward as the subway car doors opened and pressed the crisp, heavy-stock card into the woman’s hand, careful that our fingers not touch. “I’m not a nut, you understand? Not crazy. Call me if you need a job.”

  The woman and her daughter stepped off the train. The doors jolted shut and I felt strangely exhausted. The other riders stared at me. The woman turned back, safe now on the other side of the glass—still beautiful in the harsh fluorescent light of the platform—and glanced down at the card in her hand. Her daughter waited for her mother’s reaction. Then the woman looked up at me, lifting her chin, her pressed-lipped expression admitting nothing.

  Brooklyn is, still, a great and romantic place. I lived in the Victorian brownstone neighborhood of Park Slope, not far from Grand Army Plaza, the entrance to Prospect Park. An immense arch honoring the thousands of Union men who died in the Civil War stands in the plaza, and is decorated with generals and soldiers and freed slaves massed in the heat of struggle. At the top of the arch thunders a giant bronze monument of winged Victory driving her chariot of horses. The figures have tarnished to a bright, marbleized blue, and their frenzied, death-rapturous eyes have blind dominion over the plaza, where black nannies clucking in various Caribbean dialects wheel an army of white babies into the park each day. The neighborhood attracts upper-middle-class families and abounds with Montessori schools, video stores, automatic banking machines, real estate offices, good bookshops, cafés, and bakeries selling croissants and expensive coffee. On weekends, beneath the old maples and oaks that canopy the streets, children can be found scribbling in colored chalks on the massive slabs of slate that front the grand nineteenth-century buildings while their mothers or fathers sit out on the stoops with a fat Sunday Times. I lived there because of the quiet atmosphere, because the train that ran past my office in Manhattan deposited me only a few blocks away, and because it had once seemed an ideal place in the city to have a family.

  My house, a four-story brownstone that needed a couple of hundred more hours of my labor, had been owned by a Mrs. Cronister, the last remaining heir of the man who invented the pneumatic tire and manufactured them in Brooklyn. In the small front yard a flowering pear tree arched over the cast-iron fence and the stone steps that lifted sharply up to the first floor. I lived on the parlor floor and the two floors above it, slowly renovating room by room, and from time to time rented out the garden apartment to help pay the mortgage. Within the triple set of parlor doors, the walls were original horsehair plaster, smooth as glass, the inlaid parquet floors firm, the rooms quiet and large, and the mahogany woodwork ornate and magnificent. Weekends I sat reading in the small, sunny backyard and each spring I worked the soil, finding old marbles, bits of broken free-blown bottles, bent spoons made of pewter, and, once, an 1893 Morgan silver dollar. By July I would begin to harvest several varieties of tomatoes, as well as scores of cucumbers that exploded in a happy riot of vines and yellow blooms over the fence. At night, when I was feeling melancholy, in a mood to drink, I sat on the roof in a pink beach chair and gazed past the dark silhouettes of Brooklyn’s rooftops and church spires toward the awesome, ever-blazing Manhattan skyline—the twin towers of the World Trade Center jutting into the sky on the tip of the island, and farther north, the calm grandeur of the Empire State Building, the soft curves of the Chrysler Building, the sharp Citicorp spike. I loved this house, the beveled surfaces of dark stone, the old windows, the stair banisters that rattled faintly when the subway passed beneath. Like the sprawling borough of Brooklyn, it had once seemed a great and romantic place to raise children. Now, however, the house was my dark, silent partner, a vault of solitude.

  That April evening, my head still light, I closed the front door behind me and, as I did six days a week, removed and discarded the pieces of mail that had my dead wife’s name on them. Her name continued to exist and multiply in the unending generation of computer mailing lists despite my efforts to put a stop to it, spawning CAR-RT-SORT permutations of catalogs for clothes, housewares, charities, and so forth. I have found that it helps to be drunk when throwing away mail addressed to one’s murdered wife, and I could not stand to see her name printed plainly above the address of the house she cherished and where she had never lived.

  Liz and I met after college, lived together a couple of years, then married. She’d come from an unhappy childhood and later—when she had traveled far enough from that upbringing, and she had even been able to laugh about what horrible people her parents had been—she would tease me that I’d married her because I was a sucker for women in distress. We were both children of divorced parents and I think there was something broken in each of us that the other more or less fixed. Or maybe it was something else—the reasons didn’t matter to me; I was happily domesticated, not terribly mindful that we lived in a cramped Upper West Side apartment, thankful—in the shallow, confident way that I was back then, the way we all were, back in the eighties—that I had been lucky enough to find someone. I was just starting out at the Corporation, not yet in the big
money. Hell, I didn’t even have my acid trouble yet, not even the first light wheeze in my throat. Not even the first small, useless cough.

  How was it back then? Good—better than I realized. For four years we lived an unremarkable, largely satisfying life. Jack and Liz Whitman, young married couple. Sex, work, food, friends and related gossip, exercise, books, arguments, movies, enough money—the stuff of days. I don’t pretend that our love was spectacular or unique, and I suppose that later in this account I must explain certain of my own transgressions against Liz, but for the most part we were happy. Our hopes were high, and when Liz became pregnant, we decided to look around for a house, using money her father had left her when he died. Her belly was swelling week by week and we had seen the flickering blob on the ultrasound machine that our obstetrician identified as life, and at five months Liz could feel a tiny nascent kicking inside her—“kicking field goals,” I would tell her—and friends began to give us lilliputian cotton outfits with duckies or rabbits or clowns floating dreamily across the tiny chest and bottom, and Liz held these up before me, marveling at how absolutely cute the little feet were, and how funny was the amount of space in the tiny pants, large enough to accommodate the chubby legs and fat diapers. I began, of course, to think of Liz as a mother and not only as my wife, as possessing the independent power of maternity that men can only observe, and I became interested in such things as baby strollers and changing tables. My one moment of panic came when Liz fainted in the summer heat of Grand Central Station. Sprawled on the gum-stained platform, she was revived by a retired fireman. But she became stronger, and after the first three months exhibited remarkable energy—the energy of hope, I concluded. Our apartment was awash in books about pregnancy nutrition and childbirth and breast-feeding. We knew that the baby’s heart beat about 130 times a minute, and every day that Liz’s pregnancy progressed normally, the fetus gaining precious ounces at an increasing rate, I gave silent thanks and (though not a religious man like my father) appealed to God to deliver to us a healthy baby. We found the brownstone in Park Slope. Childless Mrs. Cronister, spurning the rapacious real estate brokers, knew she was moving to a nursing home and soon onward to the grave. When she saw my pregnant wife, her eyes watered and she dropped her price seventy-five thousand dollars. Life was good.

  Three days after closing on our house, signing the mortgage papers at the bank; three days after we put the change-of-address forms in the mail, after we walked up the stoop, drank a couple of glasses of Mumm’s in the empty living room, and awkwardly made love on a flimsy mattress I’d dragged into the house for that very purpose—with me making the necessary compensations for the marvelous warm swell of Liz’s belly (two hearts beating against my skin—one large and the other the size of a thimble); three days from that glorious and hopeful moment, and thirty-four weeks after Liz had conceived, the whole fat happy dream went straight to hell.

  This is what happened: Liz traveled way uptown after work to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center to visit a friend who’d just had a double mastectomy, and on the way back from the echoing hallways of the hospital to the subway she paused in front of a storefront Korean grocery to wait for the light. I now know every foot of pavement between the hospital and that street corner, and how Liz stood back from the curb near the stands of bright fruit. The Korean owners, ever industriously self-improving, polished tomatoes and yellow peppers and apples while an English-language instruction tape played with monotonous solemnity—“I agree to buy the television . . . you agree . . . he agrees . . . we agree . . . they agree. They agree to buy the television. I have agreed to buy the television . . .” Around Liz swirled the lights and sounds of Harlem; across the street was the Audubon Theater and Ballroom, where more than twenty years prior Malcolm X preached his message of black revolution and was assassinated. Behind her, as the NYPD detective told me later, stood a group of “young black males”—the ubiquitous handful of postliterate homeboys in acid-washed jeans, gold chains, big jackets—the kind of young bloods who scare the hell out of the white middle class, who scare the hell out of me, all angry voices and stylized for violence. I was always telling Liz not to come home too late. She stood on the corner inconspicuously in her wool coat, perhaps a bit short of breath and feeling the ever-greater heaviness in her belly; perhaps, too—rather likely, given Liz’s charitable temperament—she considered the condition of her friend, who that very moment lay staring at the ceiling of her hospital room, wondering if she was fated for a slow, agonizing death from cancer. What is certain is that as Liz waited for the light, a silver BMW with tinted windows—in my nightmares, it is a sleek, fantastic vehicle of death, gliding noiselessly through wet, empty streets, colored lights sliding up the dark windshield—pulled over and someone poked the short metal barrel of a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol over the electric window and started shooting. The scene itself is no longer remarkable in our society—kids scrambling for cover, screams, the clipping pop of gunfire, glass shattering, sirens arriving. Liz was right in the way of it.

  I have wondered, at least a million times, about the sudden expression on Liz’s face. I have imagined myself stepping bravely in front of her, I have imagined every permutation of chance, including the version in which she bends her head forward to look in her purse for something—a subway token—tipping it forward just enough that the slugs whiz harmlessly a quarter inch above her temple, and I have imagined the version in which she suddenly crouches in a successful attempt to protect the baby, and the version in which she realized she is wounded but is still able to gesticulate with quick practicality to another bystander that she is pregnant and that the baby must be saved above all.

  But none of these things happened. The ambulance took Liz directly back to Columbia-Presbyterian. The proximity of the hospital made no difference, ultimately, and I do not like to think of what those bullets did to her or to the fetus, which at nearly eight months could have lived outside the womb. I asked to see my baby. Two nurses and then a doctor refused me. I begged. I wept and snarled and threatened hysterically. No, they said, absolutely not. I invoked one of the Corporation’s law firms. That scared the doctor. He asked me to wait a few minutes. Then one of the hospital administrators, a tired little man, appeared and sat me down in his office, holding a slip of paper in his hand.

  “You’re in shock, Mr. Whitman, you must understand that.”

  This didn’t impress me. “I want to see my child,” I said.

  “I can’t allow that.”

  “Why?”

  He studied me.

  “Why?” I repeated.

  “We just can’t allow it.”

  “Why?” I insisted. “You must have some reason.”

  The hospital administrator heard this and nodded. “It is”—he sighed with detached exhaustion—“it is the seasoned opinion of my emergency room surgeon that exploding bullets were used. These are very popular among certain populations.” The baby was a girl, he added, reading now from the slip of paper, perfectly formed, utterly healthy, and an estimated six ounces heavier than average for thirty-four weeks’ gestation. She had turned head down early—as if eager to be born, I thought. Had she not, it was possible that the bullet would have passed by or through her feet. But, the administrator told me, his eyes locked on mine, with the baby inverted in Liz’s womb, the bullet had hit her head. Almost nothing of it was left.

  “I’m sorry,” he concluded.

  Meanwhile, Liz lingered, her body trying to recover both from its wounds and from the unsuccessful emergency cesarean. She never regained consciousness and I counted that a good thing, for though I was unable to say good-bye to her, neither did I have to tell her that her baby had perished. She died two days after the shooting, late at night, while I was asleep in the waiting room. The nurses forgot to wake me, and in the morning I found an empty, stripped bed in Liz’s room. The momentousness of it rushed at me when I stood before her corpse in the hospital morgue, the white-coated attendants standing idly n
ear. I remember that a radio played from the other side of the room. Something hard and angry by the Rolling Stones. Liz’s face was lifted upward in the squinting grimace of death, her eyes filmily half-open, unseeing, not tracking my face as I looked at her. I’m so tired, Jack, her expression seemed to say. The air around me roared. In her pregnancy, Liz’s skin had flared with demure little pimples, a badge of fertility, and she had dutifully covered them with whatever skin-colored gunk she used, and there in the morgue I noticed that the oxygen mask had smeared this stuff away. And seeing this, I suffered a great affection for those pimples and for the first wrinkles and cellulite and drop of flesh that Liz, a woman only thirty-one, already had. I pulled back the white plastic bag far enough to see one of the star-shaped exit wounds, hatched with sutures of thick black thread. Her nudity before the morgue attendants seemed a gratuitous violation and I pulled the bag back up. The tip of Liz’s nose was cold. Her lips, when I bent to kiss her the last time, were set like stone. This, then, was the first great deviation from my plans and desires. This is where, I see now, it all began.

  I was monstrous with the grief of it, homicidal for revenge. Of course I’d believed that this was the kind of thing that happened to other people: gang members, crackheads, the foolish, the unworthy. And now it seemed that any ten coked-out dudes lounging around the street corners abusing the English language or begging change in the subway stations were not worth the life of my lovely, blue-eyed Liz. I looked at every strutting teenager with a gold chain around his neck as if he were the one who had killed my wife. That guy could be the guy. I thought about buying a gun and just driving up to Harlem and picking off someone, some poor bastard, as retribution. Why the fuck not? In the great balance sheets of justice, it seemed reasonable. I was demented, of course, a man whose grief had ignited his smoldering racist beliefs. These were the ugliest of thoughts, but I had them, I fed them, I believed in them—they seemed fair and true. I hounded the detectives, but every witness said all he or she remembered was the silver BMW—“with that fucking smoky glass, man,” said one—and inside it several young black men, the pounding stereo speakers and an absurd moment of laughter after the gun appeared above the power window and fired.