ABBY, AUGUST 13, 2015
My frail boy, he seemed to be backsliding, his voice more hesitant than it had been a few months before, the slight stutter, the muttering quality had returned. I gathered him from LaGuardia early in the morning.
“Did my Ministry vinyl ever turn up?” he said. “That was an original vinyl, I think it might have been worth something.”
“No, I don’t believe it did,” I said brightly, turning around with a smile. “But remember your trumpet from sixth-grade band? That came through totally unscathed!”
He looked wan. I knew he must be weary from the overnight flight. I suggested he take a rest when we got to Mariah’s.
When he went to unload his bag from the back seat, he noticed a tote bag holding posters. I’d printed them on the high-res machine at work that we used to test packaging designs. The color saturation was sumptuous. He stared down at the announcement for a Labor Day rally and march. “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains,” he read out loud. He looked up at me. “Now you’re quoting Rosa Luxemburg?”
“Murdered by fascists in 1919, Berlin,” I said. “I’ve been reading.”
He frowned at me. “Are you antifa, Mom?”
“No,” I said, shyly. “Maybe a fellow traveler, a bit. Do you mind?”
He stared at the poster again. “I’m not sure.” Then he said, “I’m starving.”
At a diner around the corner from Mariah’s we ate cheeseburgers and talked about what he’d need for the new school year, with the first day just two weeks out. New jeans, new notebooks, a new pair of sneakers.
I pointed to his grubby old shoes. “I guess you’ll be saying so long to Dax?”
I’d read up too on the young Milanese man who had been knifed by a family of fascists—two sons and a dad, with a dog named Rommel—and was honored every April with a wreath laying in Milan. Pete set down his burger and said, “I knew you were up to something, Mom. Dmitri told me you’d contacted him. I think it’s very weird. I thought you hated him. I mean . . .” He gave me a searching look. “Really, are you antifa, Ma?”
I blushed. “You know what I like about it? Its clarity. ‘No tolerance for intolerance.’ I realized that it appeals to me, the clarity, at this point in my life.” I shrugged. “So I decided to help out, just a little bit.”
He nodded, measuring my words. I opened my tote, rummaged around, and pulled out a pack of small square decals bound by a rubber band. Double flags, the stylized fist. In big block font, classic black on red: WE WILL NOT AGREE TO DISAGREE. I slid one out from the rubber band and handed it to him. “For your new shoes?”
He studied the decal, flipping it over and over, then looked up at me. “There’s going to be an action at the end of this month. Not that I think you should go,” he added. “Not that I think you would.”
He asked me if I was going to finish my fries. I pushed their grease-spattered cardboard boat in his direction. We finished our meal, and not ten minutes after we’d returned to the carriage house, Dmitri turned up. He was coming, he said, from his new girlfriend’s apartment just a few blocks away. “She is a certified flamethrower, this woman,” he told me earnestly. “She’s a French exchange student at Stuyvesant, but she’s like pure French resistance.” He turned to Pete. “She has a tattoo that says ‘Killah P.’”
Pete looked impressed. Dmitri turned to me, with an air of patient explanation. “A Greek rapper, murdered by Golden Dawn faschos a few years back. Google him.”
Pete toured him around the carriage house. He seemed, adorably, just a bit proprietary, proud to be staying in such a place, with its vaulted ceilings, the luxe living spaces, the studio with its appealing mess of works in progress. Dmitri took it all in, smiling and nodding politely. He laughed when he saw the portrait of Mariah’s grandfather. “Damn, check out the medals on that guy.”
And then he turned to me. “You should come to the Labor Day action, Abby. We need numbers, all we can get.”
“She can’t,” Pete said.
“I can’t,” I nodded. “That’s the last weekend to deal with the house, before Dennis and Ben fly home and we move back in.”
Peter showed Dmitri into the tiny elevator, which Mariah had lined with cream-colored linen and framed sketches—mostly portraits of her old loves, hung there like trophies. I’d looked for Dennis in this gallery, and didn’t find him, but every time I took the slow and jolting ascent to my room on the third floor, I’d stare at one of the several empty spots, the naked linen, and I’d wonder. Mariah had assigned Pete a tiny room up under the old carriage house eaves, where she stored ball gowns from the 1950s, things her mother and grandmothers wore to weddings of deposed royals, the princes and princesses of Greece and Romania, who were now dressage riders in the English countryside or worked at investment houses in Zurich. Tulle and lace and satin, so thick and rich it hung in slabs like meat, hung high on a pole that extended from wall to wall. Dmitri reached up and ran his hand over the massed skirts. “Oh shit, you can still smell the perfume,” he said.
“Bye, Mom,” said Pete, gently pushing me out and closing the door. A bit later, I knocked with a tray of snacks and sodas. Dmitri was gone, and my son had fallen fast asleep on a narrow twin bed below their skirts, a boy in a bower.
ABBY, AUGUST 14, 2015
In Brooklyn, the spacklers were spackling, a toilet sat in the entryway ready to be set atop the wax circle around the frightening hole in the floor of the bathroom. New ceramic tiles, square and white as movie-star teeth, grinned at me from a carton. Finally. We had talked for years of renovating that raggedy overworked single bath. Dennis and I could never pull the trigger, but the fire had pulled the trigger for us.
Pete’s room held a pile of melted and waterlogged video game gear and he kicked dejectedly at it. “Well, I’ve outgrown this crap anyhow,” he said. Once upon a time I had despaired about those games and the hours they consumed, but now I just felt a pang. Was it only eight weeks ago he and Ben had been excitedly designing a colony in space?
Downstairs, the whine of the saws paused, then the contractor on the job called up to me. “Someone to see you, Abigail.”
In a linen jacket and blue gingham shirt, the detective stood next to the toilet in the entryway, one foot up on the seat, presenting a bouquet of pink roses wrapped in cellophane. “For you,” he said, smiling brightly.
Then his smile vanished and he straightened. The bouquet fell, dangled by his side. My son had come down the stairs ten seconds behind me.
“How’s it going, Pete,” he said.
I turned to see a measure of comprehension cross my boy’s face, the shadow of a moving thought.
“You remember the officer,” I said, brightly.
Pete had halted a few steps above me. “Uh huh.”
“A little goodwill offering,” the detective said, putting the bouquet atop the toilet tank. “I hope all is OK with you, kid,” he added.
Pete shrugged, his eyes revealing nothing. I noticed then that he had a package tucked under his arm. Oblong, wrapped in dirty brown paper.
I was reaching for it when the detective spoke from behind us. “I’m off then, just wanted to check in . . .”
“No, you stay, I’m leaving,” said Pete. Evading my grasp he shoved past us, clutching this square to his chest like a shield, then dashed out the door and onto the sidewalk, the sound of his sneakered feet snapping like raps on a skull, away across the pavement and out of sight and hearing.
I looked at the man. Eleanor was right. He was handsome as fuck. The powerful planes of his face, softened by thick eyelashes, lush brows, those bronze eyes, that flickered with intelligence and calculation. I felt them taking my measure.
“I know you’ve been snooping around about me,” I said.
He nodded. “I thought that might be what you were pissed about. Just trying to help you out, and Pete.”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what you’re up to.”
“Yeah,” he said
. The slow-dimple grin. “I’m always up to something, so it’s good for you to realize that. But you’ve gotten to me, Abigail. I mean it.”
“Don’t even try,” I said. “I’m not falling for it.”
As I said this, aggravating liquid started welling in my lower lids, eyeballs pressed from behind, painful knot yanked tight in my throat. He saw and moved toward me, put his arms around me. Even as I stiffened away from him and the tears spilled, in another part of my brain—oh, my poor, strange brain—I was absorbing the feeling of his bones again, tensile, strong, the clever architecture of him. But I gathered myself and said, in what I hoped was a cold and ruthless tone, “Delete me from your phone.”
Driving home, in a woeful state, I steered, almost without thinking, to Rocco’s on Bleecker Street. Sprinkle-covered Italian cookies and a cold Coke with plenty of ice. This has always been my go-to treat in times of confusion and despair. And always from Rocco’s. So how could I be surprised to see her there?
I feel her first. A cool gust down the back of my neck, in the heat of the old café. I turn to see who is invading my personal space. I nearly jump out of my skin.
You don’t look good, she says. Your eyes are like red planets.
I thought you were gone.
Not yet. But soon. He made some real money. We’re going away, soon.
Yes. The turning point for him. Eli had been prowling the heat-addled neighborhoods of central Brooklyn on his bike. To photograph, to score, I’m not sure which. August 1991. On Utica Avenue, where West Indians and Hasids lived uneasily crammed together, a small boy and girl, children of Guyanese immigrants, were mowed down by a blue Grand Marquis station wagon in a motorcade carrying a revered rabbi. In the heat of the summer, as the day burned on, tensions boiled over, car windows were smashed, stores torched, and finally, a young Orthodox student was stabbed to death.
Eli, prowling the streets, heard the wild rumors, more death, another famed rabbi connected to it. Crown Heights was burning. He turned up at West Twelfth Street at dawn the next morning with bruises purpling on his back, cuts on his face. I rummaged for rubbing alcohol and cotton, but all I had was vodka and a balled-up T-shirt. I swabbed him while he told me, breathless with exhilaration, how he’d been photographing boys tearing the metal grille off a clothing store, “They turned on me, and I huddled on the ground over my camera and just let them kick the shit out of me, but no way were they getting my film,” he said. He’d gone straight to the Post, who bought it all.
We got drunk, our boozy sweat blurring the copies of the Post; he ran out at dawn and bought more and left them lying all over the bed. We woke up at noon inky.
The memory makes me smile and she stares at me.
Sit and have a sprinkle cookie, I say. I open the little striped bag to show her.
Oh, she says, delighted. My favorite!
And so we sit there at a marbled Formica table dusted with the powdered sugar of earlier snackers. Severe summer sunlight bounces around the mirrored space. It is companionable, perching there together. We sit in silence, and I watch as she delicately presses a finger into each sprinkle that falls to the tissue-like napkin she’s spread on the table—as I have—and licks it off the tip. Then I do the same.
He’s full of hope. It’s so good to see. I like our chances.
No, I say. I pull my phone from my pocket, power the launch screen. This is your future.
I slide the phone across the table. I know this is a dangerous impulse. She won’t touch it. She just stares at the image there, dumbly. Her eyes go obsidian black. Her hair is piled atop her head in the heat, wet wisps are pasted to her neck.
She delicately lifts the phone, peers at the photo for a fleeting instant, then hurls it away as if she suddenly realizes it’s searing her fingers. It bounces on the old table’s marble rim, tumbles to the floor with a startling crack. She stands, a scream-like scraping of her chair. I see her turning away and moving fast toward the door, and I bend to retrieve the dark and fractured device, and as I double over, I know darkness is coming for me again too.
August 15, 2016
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
You’ve seen the data off the dead phone. All of it—texts, location tracking—support the story as she tells it. Some of the texts make me look like hell, I’ll admit. I’m not proud of it, G. But as probably you recall, I’ve always been a bit of a shitheel.
Sending you and the neuroscientist, Kazemy, possible dates for a classified meeting here to present findings. You’ll have your theories worked out, more or less?
ABBY, AUGUST 16, 2015
I woke to find myself in Mariah’s bed. A velvety altar, decked all in the plushest fabrics in shades of white and chocolate and ivory. I rolled there groggily as I woke, felt myself adrift in a melting hot fudge sundae. A remarkable and pleasant sensation—but then I sat up with a jolt.
Pete. Where was my boy. He had run away.
Mariah wavered into focus, seated in an enormous armchair, wearing spattered painter’s overalls and a bra, her hair spread in a dark corona around her head. So pink and clean were the soles of her bare feet, propped on a white ottoman, like treats on display in a posh pastry shop.
I realized after a moment that she was working a smallish clump of white modeling clay in her hands. She turned it and pressed it. Finally her eyes met mine but her expression didn’t change. She didn’t acknowledge my awakening, my stirring, didn’t shift at all. She kept working the clay.
“Please tell me Pete is here,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, struggling to keep her in focus.
“Pete is here.”
“Seriously. Is he?”
“He is downstairs, very happily sampling my music collection. The Breeders, I think. Listen.”
And I did hear it, the shuddering baseline, just audible pumping up like blood through the heart of the house.
“Did I drive here?”
“God no. The waitress at Rocco’s called you a cab, I think your car got towed.”
“Shit. Thank you though.”
“And some asshole stole your phone, apparently. Not in your purse, not on your person,” she said.
“Shit,” I said again.
“But on the upside, Pete told me you have a lover.”
I checked her face for a mocking smile. She was impassive, still, apparently, sculpting. I dropped to the bed and closed my eyes. “Shit,” I whispered.
“Abby, don’t sweat it. It is high time for you to get yours.”
Her hand moved so lightly. Unseen forces sent it this way and that. I watched, enthralled.
“And Dennis,” I said. “Is it high time for him to get his?”
Her movements didn’t stop, didn’t even pause. “Ultimately, we’re each and every one of us walking alone,” she said. “Him, me, you. Paths will diverge and converge.”
“So you are a divergence for him,” I said.
“Your married love is so deep and so long, your paths will bend toward one another again, if you allow it to go that way.”
“Or what we’re doing now might destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to build.”
“Or it might just destroy the constraints,” she said. “The atrophied bits, that lock you in place. It might bring you both, Dennis and you, just the right degree of freedom.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“You think I’m just making a self-serving argument, I’m sure,” she added with a smile. “But I love both of you, truly. I want what’s good for you.”
I sat up now, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, steadying myself by gripping a sleek dark-wood bedpost. Maybe I was close to attaining the right degree of freedom. I felt freer now than when I was her, in my twenties, with Eli, or than I’d been at any other point in my life. I stood, my feet shaking, but holding me. “I think I’m a bit angry.”
“Yes,” said Mariah. “You are.”
ABBY, AUGUST 30, 2015
And so it was that this very morning, a luminous late-summer Sunday, a time chosen because the city was mostly empty and even the police force was understaffed, that the Brigade decided to strike at the heart of fasco-capitalism. Pete left early in the morning with Dmitri. I didn’t intend to march. I headed for Brooklyn to check on the paint job in the living room and rehang some kitchen shelves, Dennis’s big battered toolbox in the back seat.
But driving downtown, I saw them mustering, south of the old fish market buildings. I couldn’t just drive past. I found a parking spot easily. From a bucket of cleaning supplies in the back of the car, I grabbed an old blackened rag—a scrap of one of those old T-shirts—and tied it around my neck, bandanna style. I slipped into the back of the pack, covering my face as the others did. Pete wouldn’t see me. He was in the front line, with Dmitri.
Who handed me the hammer? I think it was Vincent, who moved through the pack, pulling bullhorns, bats, and other battle gear from an enormous sports-gear duffel slung over his shoulder. Just props, I thought. How did it begin, then? The destruction.
A splattering of eggs on an idling stretch limo. Some logos from a large real estate developer, torn down from a construction fence. A feeling of escalating wildness as the throng headed farther downtown, funneled into ever-narrower streets. But truly the only vivid recollection, finally, I have is that sound. And how it shocked my body, the juice of it, the energy mainlined as with a syringe, and this just through the sound, the sonic boom of the hammer on the thick plate glass, bouncing through the slot canyons, off the skyscrapers wedged so greedily into those skinny old streets way downtown. I still feel the waves of it vibrating through me as I write this, cleaning me out, purifying me in some fashion, scouring every artery and even those lacy passages that run through the center of my bones.
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