by Jack Livings
Short of Bo’s Finnish smoker, they emptied the terrace of everything that wasn’t bolted down. A couple of guys were itching to rip off the doors or dismantle the crosshatched wooden pergola down at the other end of the terrace, already heaving in the wind. They eyed the smoker. But they held off. Maybe they’d satisfied their urges. Maybe they’d decided to call it quits before they killed someone. Maybe they’d decided that whoever was going to cut Bo and Jane a check in the morning was already in hock for enough as it was. Okay, okay. Enough. We’re not savages, after all.
And it was then that Sid Feeney appeared on the living room threshold, having field-humped Albert Caldwell from the bedroom where he’d found the sick son of a bitch naked on the bed next to me, holding my hand, mere seconds from committing an act of perversion that Feeney had himself repeatedly been subjected to as a child, though he’d never spoken of it to a soul, an act of perversion that had left him with an undetectable internal injury that had led to a lifelong struggle with malfunctioning reproductive equipment, and a surely not unrelated pear-sized prostate—the very prostate that had sent him on a quest for an unoccupied bathroom in which to relieve himself, the urgency of the situation reaching critical levels as he frantically crab-walked door to door, the ticking bomb in his gut clicking ever closer to detonation even as he gobbled up eyefuls of the same orgiastic scenery Vik had, shouting mangled encouragements he’d picked up on visits to brothels in Bangkok and Kyoto, before trying to bulldog his way into the hallway bathroom, which had attracted even more participants since Vik’s visit, Feeney going in low and fast not for fun but for relief, that sweet expulsive release, rebuffed due to space limitations despite his insistence that it’d just take a goddamn minute, his feverish worry swelling as the pressure in his pelvis increased, leading to his decision to utilize the next amphora or Ming vase that swung into view, hell, any old receptacle into which he could coax out the dribble that would, over an agonizing stretch during which it was not uncommon for him to get through a liberal sampling of J. P. Sousa’s greatest hits, reduce the searing pain in his abdomen by increments so subtle as to render the process of urination a kind of cosmic joke. It was in search of such a receptacle that he burst into the bedroom where I was asleep.
I’ve been told that once incarcerated, when time was available at a discount and reflection was encouraged as a means of reducing recidivism, Feeney claimed to have given the matter a great deal of thought and arrived at the conclusion that his actions had been redemptive. He expressed amazement that his own life—an old creased map he’d hardly even bothered to consult anymore—could have surprised him so. By his reckoning, it was his own weekly childhood buggering by the next-door neighbor that had saved my life. All the suffering and shame had served a goddamn purpose, after all! How intricate and unknowable, he would say, is the universe that God hath wrought!
Like many a God-fearing man, Sid Feeney’s interpretative powers were governed by the desperately optimistic belief that there’s got to be a brighter day just around the corner. Well, Sid Feeney found his, and I suppose that’s worth something.
The first thing Feeney had done was punch Albert in the face. That got no reaction, so Feeney grabbed Albert by the neck. It was then that I began to wake from the strange dream, a dream about a flood, that Albert had invaded.
Feeney’s bladder had gone ahead and begun to empty itself when he’d hoisted Albert up onto his shoulders, an enuretic saddle forming along the inseam of his khakis. When I opened my eyes, Feeney was already at the door. Albert was naked, draped over his shoulders like a sack of rice but, being wider than both a bag of rice and the doorway, suffering the comic trope of having his head slammed repeatedly against the doorframe. Eventually Feeney prevailed and muscled him through. I trailed after them, pulled out of the room by the thread that connected me to Albert, a weird sense of familiarity, locked together by his presence in my dream. Through the smoky foyer, vortices swirling off Albert’s protruding buttocks, past the Joan Mitchell, toward the wash of music. The crowd parted.
I witnessed Sid Feeney’s crazed path across the dance floor. In the living room, the wind tearing through the terrace doors had cleared the smoke, and the snow had created a white runway that he mounted as though summiting a mountain peak. His legs stabbed forward and he was yelling. I couldn’t make out the words over the percussive force of the music blowing through my body, but learned later that he was issuing the Roman war cry, Barritus. Sid Feeney was a maniac. Of course no one tried to stop him. What were they going to stop him from doing? Who could have imagined? No one touched Feeney, but a few slapped Albert’s naked rear as he passed because, you know, what a riot.
Once Sid Feeney was on the terrace, he went directly to the parapet and threw Albert Caldwell over.
He’d done it with a dipping, shrugging movement, as though Albert were, in fact, only a sack of rice destined for its spot in a general store display. He just tipped his shoulders and down Albert went. It was his composure, I think, that blinded everyone, causing those very people who’d seen him commit a murder, those people who’d been standing right next to him, to question the trustworthiness of their own senses. He was so cool about it, how could they square what they’d thought they’d seen with what had actually happened? Obviously what they thought they’d seen was some kind of illusion, or a hallucination. It was simply not possible. He’d thrown a … bag of something, right? What the hell was it? Sack of sand? Was it some sort of mannequin? A sex doll? What a gas! Feeney walked back inside to the bar table, where old Franklin, standing with his back to the terrace, had seen nothing, and in his long-suffering way leaned in to hear Feeney’s order.
No one looked over the edge. Once Feeney had his glass of whiskey in hand, he crossed the living room, where the dancing had stopped and little constellations of eyeballs had formed to stare at him. He took a seat on the sofa, where his bladder continued to leak. He was about seventy-five feet from the terrace doors, and the crowd outside, like exiles amassed on the deck of their escape vessel, was frozen, staring in at him as though he manned the cannon on the cruiser that had tracked them, the one who could sink them or allow them to slip into the fog and escape.
About thirty people on the terrace had witnessed him throw Albert over the parapet. Another hundred had stepped aside when he’d zagged through the living room. They’d seen him carry a person—a torso, arms, a head of white hair, the pickled feet, the sad little cuttlefish dangling between those scrawny legs—across the room and onto the terrace, only to return without the person.
Sid Feeney had once lived at the Apelles, before the West Side turned into a communo-miscegenist freak show and he’d fled across the park to the East Side. He was familiar with the tradition that had led to the genesis of the Apelles Fund. He’d sent his check that year, enough to keep Jane Vornado off his back.
So when he yelled, I made my goddamn donation! I’m entitled! surely more than a few of those within earshot would have gotten the reference if they’d been able to hear anything over the music. Would they have even thought it was a crazy thing to say?
Worth noting: observing a murder while scrambled on quaaludes doesn’t make one a reliable witness, and if the shock sobered the crowd up, they collectively dove right into their pockets for another dose. Before long, the witnesses had shaken the whole scene off like a bad dream, which was how most of them described it to themselves the next day: a bad dream, a thing too weird, too unbelievable, to have actually happened. Those who got pinned down by New York’s finest were all, you know, somewhere else in the apartment, or looking the other way, or were embarrassed to say they had no memory at all of the party. You know how it is. But that night, staring at Feeney, wetting himself over there on the sofa with his drink on his knee, they knew it had happened, every one of them, because no one joked about it, and no one turned to a neighbor and said, Hey, did you see that? Without speaking, they collectively agreed to an alternative reality. It’s a common occurrence, more common t
han we might think. Silence alters the past.
No one at the party called the police. No one jumped on Sid Feeney and pinned him to the floor. No one freaked out and ran around the room pulling out her hair and ululating. No one fainted. One by one, people drifted in from the terrace. The constellations broke apart. People started swaying again, almost like dancing. Their arms moved as though they were shoveling dirt into a narrow channel of shared memory. All was forgotten. Except by me.
Part III
15.
He was in a hospital. There was water to the south. Albert’s eyes felt like oblong, distended cones straining against his eyelids, the cornea aching against the tender conjunctiva like a hatchling working at the shell. They wanted out, they wanted to see! Oh, deny not the sweet delight of oculism! But deny he did, clenching tightly as he lay in the bed listening to the clicking wall clock and timing his breathing to the second hand in approximation of a sleeper’s respiration. In, hold hold, out, hold hold. In, hold hold, out, hold hold. The nurse was still there. What in Satan’s fiery red hell was she doing?
Polishing her nails? He’d never known a nurse to do anything more than the absolute minimum required. Needle in, needle out, roll, cover, and tuck. Their smug polyester hips and square shoes, the stern architecture of their caps. Where were those romantic nurses of the Great War, plump, young, and dimpled, so eager to subsume their own desires to the recovery and carnal repair of the wounded soldier? Of course, not even the most patriotic example would be able to bring herself to minister to Albert’s sallow flesh. He remembered what it was to be young; to have no awareness of one’s body as anything other than an instrument of pleasure. He hadn’t lost that memory. To be old was to be an encyclopedia of the plights of the flesh, lord of a crumbling manor. It made you zealous in your adherence to those routines that, when performed in the proper order, might reduce your pain one-tenth of one percent. Constant awareness of your own decrepitude. How many times had he been in and out of the hospital over the last ten years? Five? Ten? Prostate, heart, colon, an iron triangle of ailments, each one a subtraction of pleasure: a good orgasm, a good walk, a good shit, all gone. Leakage, palpitations, fear of the outside, depression.
What in Satan’s fiery red hell was she doing? He heard the soft rustle of polyester, an inhalation strumming the harps of her nasal cavity. Slowly he lifted his eyelids, just enough to peer through his eyelashes’ dewy prisms at the penumbra of her shoulders as she stood at the window, her back to him, arms crossed as if to warm herself, her fingers clasping the backs of her arms. Christ’s sake, she was watching the snow fall? He waited until she dropped her hands and smoothed her uniform. By the time she’d turned toward him, his eyes were closed and he was a vision of peace.
The nurse squeak-rustled nearer, past him, out the door. Hermetic swoosh, latch snapping into strike plate. He waited thirty ticks of the clock before attempting to lever himself out of the bed. Once he’d gotten his feet on the floor, he made his way across the linoleum to peek through the crosshatched glass. The angle was bad for a full sweep of the hall, and he cracked the door for a better look. They never left you alone for long. He’d have to be quick about it. To the right, the hall was clear to the elevator bank. To the left was the nurses’ station, and though he could hear their voices, they came from somewhere else, down the corridor, around the corner. Satisfied with his chances, he removed the gown, located his pants, shirt, and shoes, dressed, and crept out. He did not bother with the buttons on his sleeves.
All his life, he’d relied on logic to survive. On the playground, scrawny Alfie had been able to demoralize bigger kids with his argumentative powers. That hadn’t stopped the beatings, and often enough invited them, but he secured his intellectual superiority early, and it became his source of power. In court he was an assassin, logic his dagger. He argued with an otherworldly calm that unhinged opposing counsel—the more devastating the argument, the more beatific his countenance. It wasn’t a strategy, one of those synthetic plays lawyers trot out to woo jurors. It was genuine. The more decisive the blow he’d dealt, the dreamier the look in his eyes. And he’d won, and won, and won, piling up a record of dominance that made him not only rich but deeply feared. Nothing in his life suffused him with the warmth he felt constructing a perfect stone wall of argument. In those days, his mind had been so supple he could recall every legal argument he’d ever made, each one a dark line traversing the Irish countryside, the full effect like a Mondrian scored into the rolling green, the interplay of precedent and analysis, policy and proof, arguments intersecting and reinforcing one another. A grand construction, a life’s work, from his first, in Constitutional Law with Professor Haggerty, 1923, to the last, New York State Supreme Court, 1971. Logic had been a reliable companion, a guide with whom he had been unafraid to wander the darkness. It had been his only comfort. And what more did he need? The capacity for reason was the only measure of a man.
Now his reason was failing him, or, more precisely, he was failing it, failing to abide by its tenets. He was on iffy terms with cause and effect. To wit, his failure to consider the weather’s ability to foul up his suicide plan. The plan itself—that Goldbergian construction of fake emergency call, ambulance as escape vehicle, his decision to invite himself into yet another prison from which he’d have to engineer a break—was testament to the cracked, weedy ruin of his logic.
However, at the moment, his adrenal glands were streaming heavy doses of spirit-elevating hormones, and he felt sharp again, electrified. As I sift through the history of his mind, his brief visit to Roosevelt is a bright atomic spike on the dull flatline of his last year, a landmark I can use to orient myself. As familiar as I am with his inner workings, even I sometimes get lost in the wasteland.
He felt it powerfully, the resurgence of his logic, a crackling essence that he’d thought was gone forever, evaporated like the angel’s share. It marshaled his intelligence into a clear, cold liquid that coursed through him, an unstoppable natural force. He felt like he’d pinned a witness on cross. It has been so long. Oh god, the clarity, just this side of madness.
Down the hall he found a janitor’s closet, and inside, a heavy canvas coat hanging on a peg, a knitted cap sticking out of the grease-blacked mouth of one pocket. He pulled on the coat, flipped up the collar, tugged the hat low over his brow, and practically floated to the elevator.
At that late hour, the old man in the enormous coat found decent cover among the other passengers—orderlies, insomniac patients in paper shoes, interns, blurry-faced attendings who’d been pulled from their warm beds. No one gave him a second look.
The doors opened and Albert got off. On the other side of the lobby, an eager young fact-checker from WPIX named Bobby, elevated to on-air correspondent for the night, armed with a mic and a winning attitude, was conducting man-on-the-street interviews, playing goalie at the revolving doors: And what’s your name, ma’am? And are you a patient? Have you thought about how you’ll get home? Have you ever seeeeen weather like this in New York?
At first Albert felt a flash of recognition, a remnant from days when news crews parried their silver microphones at him as he loomed over the city from atop the steps at 60 Centre. They’re here for me? he thought. Damnit, why? Remember, damnit. The confusion that followed (so much for all that adrenalized logic) had a familiar shape, as though he’d awoken in a dim hotel room, unable to recall in the dark where he was—he thinks first of home, no, he’s somewhere else, turns on the lights, a hotel room, there’s my suit on the door, it’s freezing in here, it’s Chicago. Albert stood now at the edge of the light, casting about the lobby for the clue that would retract the tumblers locking tight his mind just enough to crack the door, let in a breath of air. But no.
Like bald tires spinning on ice. Unable to catch his breath. The obvious one: thrusting, thrusting away like a damn piston, but no release.
No, honestly, it wasn’t like any of those things. This defeat, this inability to catch the tail of whatever thoug
ht was eluding him, was excruciatingly nothing except itself. The loneliness of being adrift in his own mind, urging his brain to catch, like an engine on a cold morning. No, not that, either. An empty white room? How else am I to explain his predicament, where one moment there is sanity and understanding and in the next it’s been vaporized? Funerals are for the living; these metaphors are for my own comfort.
He took stock. Evidence on and around his person suggested that he intended to exit the building. A sequence of events initiated by a former he, the one who got on the elevator, a lost self. He stepped forward, falling in closely behind an orderly pushing an empty wheelchair, borrowing the man’s momentum, matching the pace of his footfall on the marble floor, shrugging off ambitious young Bobby as he reached for his arm, the wailing siren, Sir, sir, sir. The orderly swung to the side and parked the wheelchair, and Albert, caught in the no-man’s-land between exit and eager young reporter, Sir! lunged at the crossbar on the revolving door, which, frozen in place, wasn’t budging until, Sir! on the other side of the door came two men whose added effort, Sir! cracked loose the icy seal and with all of them leaning against the grindstone at once, there was the sweet luffing pop of the weather strips as they brushed the glass cylinder, Sir! Sir! hissing advancement, the wind battering him as he emerged on the snow-washed brick. Bobby pounced on the new arrivals, a pair like a circus bear and his handler, No, no interviews, the older, smaller one said, but Bobby persisted until the bigger of the two, holding a towel to his forehead, screamed, Getthafuckouttamyway loud enough to rouse even the deepest sleepers draped over the lobby chairs, and he and his handler were allowed to proceed to the desk while Bobby was left spinning his microphone by its cord and eyeballing the lobby for the old and weak.
