Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  And then I swept down the track. Safe now. I resolved to deal with Hector straight-on tomorrow, call him on the job perhaps. Jesus, I’d had the guy promoted today.

  We stopped at, then left, the Forty-second Street stop. Hector’s only chance was the F train back in the Forty-seventh Street station under Rockefeller Center but it hadn’t caught up. But my D train slowed after it pulled out of the Forty-second Street stop. The train crawled twenty yards, then picked up speed. It was on the busier track with Q and B trains in front of it. And then the F train, which ran local farther downtown, roared past us one track over, the riders illuminated in the dark tunnel. I didn’t see Hector, but I was sure he was on that train. It had probably left only seconds after my own train. Then the D train picked up speed again. We pulled into the Thirty-fourth Street station. The F was there, waiting for the transfer. Hector was on the platform, with one foot in the doorway of the F. He didn’t see me. He was looking at the wrong car, unsure whether he should switch onto the D, which now had lurched to a stop. The warning bell for both trains chimed and they both closed their doors at the same time. Hector was still in the F train, peering through the door window. He looked at my car, he looked at me.

  Both trains began to move. Both stopped at the West Fourth Street station, I knew, but, presumably, the D train would make it first, since the F was a local and stopped at Twenty-third Street and Fourteenth Street. Assuming the D arrived at West Fourth Street before the F, I was safe. I would have two options: I could stay on the train or get out, fly up the stairs before the F rolled into the station, and then be lost to Hector completely. He would get into the West Fourth Street station and not know whether I was on the D train, which would have just departed, red lights disappearing down the track, or had gone upstairs. He would know that he had one more shot at me on the D train, which stopped at the Broadway-Lafayette stop. Or, he would think, he could run upstairs and see if I was there. But by then I would be gone.

  But that didn’t happen. Just south of Twenty-third Street my train slowed in the rush-hour congestion. The other riders shook their heads in disgust. The F train drew abreast of the D and both trains came into West Fourth Street at the same time. And there was Hector looking for me through his train window. My breathing tightened and I looked around wondering what to do next. His train pulled ahead by half a car and I took the opportunity to walk to the back of my car and open the door to the next car back. But it was crowded. There was not time to shimmy through all the commuters for a couple of cars and emerge on the platform farther down. Too many people, tired and aggravated. It was harder to move now. I’d made a mistake.

  My train pulled to a stop. Across the platform, the F train was discharging passengers. Hector would be looking for me in the car I’d just left. And now I could not leave my own car easily. Not in time. I couldn’t get out now. The doors on the D closed and the train began to move toward the Broadway-Lafayette stop. Was Hector on my train or not? If yes, then I had to get off at Broadway-Lafayette, because from there the D went over the decrepit old Manhattan Bridge, where it always stopped because of flag conditions, and that would give Hector ample time to search backward through the two or three cars to find the one he knew I had to be in.

  The D train was moving now, drawing even again with the F train. Was Hector still on that, or on my D? I glanced toward the next car up, which I’d just left. Hector was there.

  I pushed rudely through a few people, crouching a little in case Hector looked through the window at the end of his car. It was a good thing he was on the short side. I saw a guy in a black raincoat.

  “Sir,” I breathed quickly. “Sell me your raincoat.”

  “What?”

  “How much?”

  He looked at me like I was a nut.

  “Christ, I dunno.”

  “I’ll sell you my hat, man,” said another man. It was a red baseball cap with an oil company logo on it. “Twenty bucks.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  I gave him the money.

  “How about a hundred for the coat?” said the other man.

  I bought that too, swaddling myself in the coat and pulling the hat down low on my head. I kept pushing toward the back of the car, putting more people between me and Hector. The train swept into the Broadway-Lafayette station, last stop in Manhattan. The F train also came into the station. In my disguise I stood with my face against the door window. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hector enter the far end of my car. Hector had not seen me, or if he had seen me, he didn’t realize it. My door opened. The F train’s doors were open, too. I left the D and stood in the middle of the platform. I could go up the stairs and get a cab—but traffic at the intersection of Broadway and Houston upstairs would be very slow. Murder to get out of there. Then a wave of transfers from the number 6, the Lexington Avenue local, came down the stairs. It would be hundreds of people. I couldn’t fight my way upstairs against the wall of flesh, so I ran down the platform, away from Hector, and stepped onto the last car of the F just as the doors shut.

  The F train didn’t go exactly where I wanted it, but it deviated at this point from the D train, which was good, since I believed Hector was still on it. The F stopped at the far end of Park Slope, at Ninth street and Seventh Avenue, and fifteen minutes later, not seeing any sign of Hector, that is where I got off. Safe.

  As I walked I took off the hat and looked at it. The crown was stained with sweat. The hat smelled, too. I chucked it in the trash. A few minutes later, six blocks north on Seventh Avenue, I walked into my laundry. Grace, a sweet Filipina woman who knew all her customers’ laundry numbers by heart, greeted me.

  “That’s not your coat,” she said.

  “You’re right.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “That’s a long story.” I pulled the coat off. “Is it worth dry-cleaning?”

  “This?”

  I hadn’t really looked at it carefully.

  “I would just throw this away. Give it to the homeless.”

  “I paid a hundred dollars for this coat.”

  “You pay ninety-five too much.” She smiled forgivingly. “I have your shirts.” She pulled down a paper package from the shelf. I turned around to glance behind me.

  Hector was standing across the street, inside a pastry shop. He was not looking for me, he was looking at me, waiting for me to lead him toward Dolores and Maria. He didn’t know they were living with me, but perhaps he had guessed. We were only two blocks from my house.

  “Grace,” I said. “Do you have a back door?”

  She quietly led me into the back room. I slipped past half a dozen young Filipina women folding towering mountains of laundry on wooden tables, and emerged in a backyard. Grace pointed toward a low fence that ran along the facing backyard and I clambered over it and trespassed my way out of this yard and then another to find a driveway to the street on the other side. An old woman rapped on her window two stories up when she saw me—some guy in a business suit frantically hopping her fence—but then I was out on the street. It had taken only a minute and then I was close to my house. I went in quickly and pushed the huge wooden door shut and locked it.

  When I got in Dolores was holding the phone.

  “There’s someone at the laundry who wants to talk with you,” she said. “I don’t understand it.”

  “Mr. Whitman?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Grace at the laundry.”

  “Grace, what can I do for you?”

  “I have something serious to tell you. There was a man here pretending he lose his ticket, but I have never seen him before. He lied and said he came when I wasn’t here. I asked him what was his number and he said he didn’t remember.”

  “But you know everybody’s number by sight.”

  “Yes. Then he ask if he can see the book, where we write down the dry cleaning. My boss was there and so I said yes, but please hurry up, I have to look up somebody’s ticket.”

  “Like when I a
lways lose mine.”

  “Yes, I look it up. He says he not have ticket so can he look at book to get the number.”

  “What?”

  “He wanted to see the book so he could see your name, I think.”

  To get the address, I realized, which was always written in, in case dry cleaning was lost and the customer needed to be located.

  “I took the book from him and told him it was wrong book. I gave him laundry book, which not have your dry clean number. He checked the book for some more time. Then he say do you know Jack Whitman’s number. I say no, how am I supposed to remember two thousand three hundred customers’ numbers on their ticket?”

  “That how many customers you got?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grace, thank you very much.”

  “Yes. I say something that maybe you don’t like.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It is none of my business but I know that you have different clothes in your laundry now.”

  “You mean women’s clothes. And a little girl’s?”

  “Yes, but I know you are not the father. And I remember this when I see your ticket number when he is looking for where you live.”

  “Grace,” I said. “You are far too smart to be working in a laundry.”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “I know.”

  That night, late, the ringing phone carved a channel in my head. I got it before Dolores woke.

  “Speak.”

  “Dolores, please.”

  Hector. There was that pause while we both realized who was on the other end.

  “Think you got the wrong number, guy.”

  “This Jack Whitman?”

  “Who is calling?”

  “Well, you should fucking remember me because I fucking remember you.” I heard music in the background and a television set. Hector was probably at a bar. “I’m going to find out where you live, asshole. I got real close today, didn’t I? Gimme a couple more days, I’m going to figure it out, go down to City Hall, look in the records, whatever.”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “That guy Ahmed, down at the building. I went back this evening. He was there.”

  I said nothing.

  “I want my wife and daughter back, you got that?”

  He waited for an answer.

  “You tell Dolores she had better just come on back here or else a lot of shit is gonna happen, man.”

  There were certain things I could have said to him: that I would go to the police, that I could hire a private detective or even a couple of goons; that his wife no longer wanted to be with him—any of it, but each of these reactions would only have angered him even more. And Dolores was asleep next to me. I did not want there to be a psychological bond between Hector and us—that of the pursuing and the pursued; I wanted instead for him to be unsure of whether he had reached me. I hung up.

  He could always call back, waking Dolores or Maria, so I disconnected the phone next to the bed and crept downstairs and disconnected that extension too. Of course, we would have to plug the phone in the next day.

  Then I had an idea. I dialed DiFrancesco. A message came on: “If you understand quantum bogodynamics, then your message will make it past the bogon filter, otherwise you will crash this unit. Speak now.”

  “This is Jack Whitman. Pick up the phone.”

  He did. I asked him how long it usually took New York Telephone to change an unlisted number.

  “Maybe a week.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Sure. Cake. Icing on cake.”

  I gave him my number and asked him to change it.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just woke me up.”

  DiFrancesco afloat in bed: a horror. “How much?”

  “How much do I want for it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow morning for a hundred bucks.”

  “Do it tonight and it’ll be worth a thousand dollars to you. Bill my company.”

  “Call me in the morning and I’ll have your new number for you.”

  I fell back into bed. Forty minutes later the phone issued half a ring. I picked it up. The line was dead, and I figured that DiFrancesco was at work. Hector may well have been at work too, but for the moment I was ahead of him.

  I am a heavy sleeper but later that same night, I woke to a peculiar smell, this time stronger than ever before, a sweet burning in my nostrils that immediately made me worry that the house was on fire—my greatest fear, since a house with so much wood in it would burn quickly. Dolores was not in the bed. As soon as I was out from under the sheets I could tell that the smell was purposeful. But where was Dolores? I listened. No sound came. I stood frozen in the middle of my bedroom wondering what to do next—and then I saw a weird flickering of light on the plaster walls above the stairs from the parlor and was seized with a great dread. I eased down the stairs in my underwear and socks, keeping much of my weight on the banister, down toward the source of the weird light.

  My living room was covered with tiny flickering candles, at least a hundred of them, and the light seemed to exist in a room of swaying shadows, a room without walls or ceiling or floor. In the middle of the room, Dolores. She was kneeling before the fireplace mantel, her hands pressed together in prayer, her lips quickly whispering in Spanish. Softly, then louder and faster, her voice breaking higher on some words and then falling into a hushed fast patter. Singing almost, a hurried singing. In front of her was a small realistic statue of Christ in his agony, such as are sold in the many botanicas in the Latino parts of Brooklyn. She must have hidden it in a closet. Christ with his eyes rolled upward at his wreath of thorns, his hands and feet impaled. Candles burning all around the figure threw twisted shapes up the walls, a hundred dead men writhing. Dolores spoke directly to the figure. I could not understand her prayers but recognized a few words: Oh, Dios mio! Quien eres Tu . . . Dios omnipotente, justica suprema . . . mi angel de la guarda . . . Jesus . . . en las aflicciones de la vida . . . As she prayed she lit a match to little piles of powder set out on the plates from my kitchen. Had I let a madwoman in my house? No, my father would have counseled, only someone with faith in God. Dios mio, tu que eres grande, tu que eres el todo, deja caer, sobre mi, pequeño, sobre mi que no existo . . .

  I watched for a few minutes, thinking Dolores was about to be done. But then she consulted a small orange book and began another prayer. I didn’t dare disturb her. The chanting began again, Dolores’s voice rising and falling, nearly breaking into tears, sometimes going fast, other times slow and then halting, upon which moment she would consult her book again, reading aloud. I stood frozen on the stairs for what seemed an eternity as she chanted, my legs stiffening, my heels aching. It was after three o’clock, but Dolores seemed only to be in the middle passage of her ritual, far from whatever final shore of exhausted redemption she sought. My eyes were heavy in the spinning, hallucinogenic light of the room and I felt a sudden vertigo, as if I might pitch headfirst down the stairs. I’m a white man. I fear mysticism, I fear everything about it, I fear the voodoo stuff that went on in Prospect Park, the headless chickens and goats. I did not know how to talk to Dolores about it, and I knew that I must not break her reverie. This was from another part of her I did not yet know, far from the tidy Presbyterian church services my mother took me to, the pews hard, the sermons delivered with reserved erudition. There were no blood and feathers and tiny bags of dirt in anything about me. I could not understand the world this way. No chanting or magic or incense. So I retreated quietly up the stairs and eased back beneath the sheets, which were now cold.

  I woke early that next morning, a warm, overcast Saturday, Dolores dead to the world next to me. She slept with her mouth open, her lips pressed against the pillow, her hair a dark tangle over her eyes. She emitted that faint warm odor of a sleeping body. I bent close to her head, and thought I smelled a pale whiff of the incense from the night before. But I couldn’t b
e sure. I wondered if I’d dreamed the whole thing and as I shot through my regular routine—shave, shower, dress—I figured that remnants of Dolores’s ceremony would be littering my living room when I went downstairs. But the room was as ever, not a paper disturbed. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps you really did dream the whole damn thing. The house had been aired out, no ashes in the kitchen garbage can, no candle drippings. Nothing.

  That afternoon, while I was in the garden showing Maria how to prune the winter die-back in the roses, Dolores called out the window.

  “There’s a guy who says you have to come to his office immediately,” she said.

  I looked up, tired of being chased by the telephone.

  “Who?”

  “He won’t say his name. He sort of wheezes, though.”

  It was DiFrancesco. “I got all kinds of stuff coming in, now. You want to see it?”

  I told Dolores that I would be gone for an hour or two.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m going to meet a guy who we’re paying a lot of money to break federal telecommunications law.”

  “To break the law?”

  “He’s got a way to steal information from fax machines. That has to be illegal.”

  Dolores contemplated this. But she remained silent.

  I took the subway to Canal Street and walked to DiFrancesco’s office, past dead fish, roasted pigs, and little old Chinese ladies doing their day’s shopping. DiFrancesco met me at the door, drippings of honey and jam and peanut butter streaking his naked chest, his hair greasy and wild. I looked closely at his face; it was pale, a great, smooth melon.

  “Jesus, you shaved off your beard.”

  DiFrancesco shrugged. “I started to smell it,” he admitted.

  “I couldn’t get it clean.”

  “Well, the weather’s getting hot—”

  “But I still have it,” he interrupted.

  “You still have it?”