“It was a good one, right?”
“Agh, disgusting,” I said, and that was all I said, but there must have been a kind of impatience or dismissiveness in the way I said it. His expression changed.
“You’re getting soft,” he said.
“I’m not getting soft. Just the opposite.”
Burnett ran his thumb along the flesh beneath his lower lip.
“I can see it. You’re gettin soft.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” I said.
64
Soccer players, age ten to sixty, dressed in blue jeans and cutoffs, ran back and forth across the concrete square in a jumbled mass. The goals were two trash cans spaced six feet apart. A woman with a baby in her lap kept score by placing little white rocks on either end of a stick. I met Emily there every day, at the park, and we watched the soccer players until it got dark. It was fall. A year since we’d met. Dusk now, and she was walking across the square. Myra walked with her, carrying a fencing duffel bag.
“Hey, Frank.”
Myra placed the bag at my feet. Emily wiped a hand on her forehead.
“I’m off,” Myra said, and as she turned I said, “You forgot your bag.”
“That’s Emily’s,” she said.
Myra walked away and Emily put a hand on my knee.
“I quit today,” she said.
“What?”
“I can’t do it anymore. I’m too weak.”
“You had a bad day,” I said.
“I’ve had a bunch of bad days, Frank. It’s been coming for a while. I can’t do it anymore.” She held a hand out. It shook slightly. “I’m too weak.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I can’t even carry the bag.”
For a moment I saw her like I’d see a patient—skinny, pale, lymph nodes becoming visible, big eyes.
“Well, that doesn’t mean anything,” I said. I was flustered. “That doesn’t matter at all. You don’t have to fence. I have money.”
“I don’t need money. I’ve arranged everything. I planned on this.” She took my hand. “We’re all set, Frank.”
The soccer players were now wandering about the park, trying to find a fountain that had not been turned off for the winter.
“It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming,” she said.
65
It was five o’clock the next day. I walked into the hospital courtyard, thinking maybe I’d see Norman, but I didn’t see him, and I went on to the boiler room, where there were rusting pipes, dangling bulbs, the enormous black boiler, and a deafening mechanical hum. I walked behind the boiler. The pipes must have run beneath the floor, because if you touched the concrete you couldn’t hold your hand there for long. It was too hot. The boiler shook the floor. A mop stuck in a wheeled yellow pail rested in the corner and the gray water dimpled with the sound. I closed my eyes. The heat and noise were squeezing me and then I was screaming. I gripped the pail and flung it against the wall. I was screaming. I struck myself on the face and head.
I tried to stop and could not. I tried. Could not. And then I leaned against the wall, bawling, making a hoarse, choking animal sound.
It went on for at least fifteen minutes.
Then the sobs slowed and stopped. I righted the pail and set the two broken pieces of the mop inside. I wiped my eyes and looked out from behind the boiler. No one there. I was thankful for that. I felt like an idiot. I didn’t want them to see me freaking out. I looked at my watch. I was late for work. I walked out and stopped at the locker-room doors, and then I went past them and on to the exit. I did not call. I didn’t talk to anyone. Fuck it. I was a no-show for work that day. I rode home on the local train, looking at each passenger. After the freakout, a sort of relief, a gentleness inside. I felt close to the people on the train, connected to them, as if we had something in common. It was a way I had not felt for a long time, and there was a certain comfort in this.
66
An abandoned lot across the street from Emily’s apartment crowded with the rusting shapes of abandoned vehicles, toppled refrigerators, bent bicycle frames with oval-shaped wheels, chairs with two or three legs, desks, bookshelves, and bedframes. Every type of tossed garbage heaped up in rotting mounds. Shrubs grew here or there, among the garbage, with paths leading to huts made of tarp and wood. By the amount of rusting debris, by the size of the trees of heaven, the weed tree that sprouted in abandoned places in New York, the lot must have been untouched for at least twenty-five years. Emily and I sat on the roof of her building and watched a tractor, a dumptruck, and a crane invade the lot. The tractor nosed into the lot, scooping the rotting mounds of old garbage into the waiting dumptruck, and the crane, which had a jointed arm ending in an enormous metal claw, grasped the trunks of trees with a terrible crunching sound, shook back and forth like a dog on a knotted rope, and uprooted each tree one by one, laying them out in a row. I reached back and touched Emily’s knee.
“You ever wish we did more?”
“More of what?”
“Things like normal people do. See plays. Go to the opera. Stuff like that.”
“I just like to hang out, Frank.”
“I have money. We can do what you want.”
She tossed a pistachio shell over the edge.
“Maybe we could go on a vacation,” she said.
“Where?”
“Maine,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Jesus,” I said. “Not the . . . Great Barrier Reef. Or China. Or Norway.”
She shook her head.
“I went as a kid to Maine. I liked it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. It’s what I want. I’ve thought of it before.”
“Well, o.k. then,” I said. “We’ll do it. Maine.”
67
The concrete footpath veered from the river and a dirt path went on through waist-high grass. Burnett walked in front. Locust trees arched overhead and through the branches we could see sky, white clouds with dark, flat bottoms. It was late in the day—eight o’clock. A cop stood at the edge of a low bluff. He waved once.
“Down there,” he said, pointing. “He’s down there.”
“How is he?”
The cop turned away.
“You won’t be working on him,” he said.
We climbed down large white rocks to a flat area along the river that was hidden from the top of the bluff. There was a hut made of two-by-fours, plywood, and blue plastic. I looked in and saw the guy lying on his right side, one arm over his head. He was dead, stiff. I parted the flap to his hut and crawled inside. A neat little home with a hard-packed dirt floor. He was wearing dirtied jeans and a sweatshirt. There was a blue cup near his head and an old two-liter soda bottle filled with water next to the cup. Piled clothes in one corner and in the other a shelf made with two planks of wood and stacked bricks. On the shelf there were a few books, pots and pans, a can of black beans, and a can of corn. A half-loaf of bread in a plastic sack with the top knotted. A calendar hung on a nail that was turned to the correct month—August. The guy had lived all alone in this little hut in the middle of New York City. He didn’t look so old. Forty. Maybe forty-five. I touched his neck and looked at his silent, gray, gaping mouth. Outside, Burnett stirred some ashes with his foot.
“You’re not gonna believe this, Frank. There’s bones in here. Bones and feathers. The guy’s been cooking pigeons and eating em.” He laughed out loud. “Fuck me. Eating pigeons. What’s that called? Squab? Is that—”
The second cop stood at the top of the bluff, his notepad open, waiting. I stuck my head out and yelled to him.
“Eight-ten,” I said.
He wrote the pronouncement time down, waved to me, then stepped out of sight.
Burnett stood in the ashes.
“You see any needles in there?”
“No.”
“Pipe?”
“No.”
“Some guy livin out here, gotta be a fuckin junkie,�
� he said.
I didn’t say anything. I climbed out of the hut and sat up on the rocks while Burnett poked around inside. There were boats going by in the middle of the river. The light-house beneath the bridge was turned on and glowed palely in the fading light. It was quiet. A minute passed. I saw Burnett part the doorway, peering into the hut.
“Jesus Christ, Frank. You oughtta take a picture.”
“Nah.”
“This’s the kind of thing’d make a good picture,” he said.
It was the sort of thing I would have photographed before. Burnett kicked at the dead man’s leg. Muttered to himself. I thought maybe I would take a picture, and then this impulse turned into revulsion. Burnett stepped toward me. I must have looked funny.
“You feelin all right, Frank?”
“I’m quitting,” I said simply.
“What?”
“I’m quitting.”
He seemed to consider this.
“Just like that.”
“Yeah. Just like that. I can’t do it anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I can’t take it.”
“Ah,” he said, as if he understood, and was even pleased with himself for predicting it. “I told you, Frank. I knew it. You’ve gotten soft.”
As we walked back to the ambulance, he looked at me closely to see if I was serious, and he saw that I was. We put ourselves out of service and drove back to the station. I walked into the lieutenant’s room and set my radio and drugs on the desk, and told them that I’d had enough. There was pleasure in doing this, even bravado, though it wasn’t so unusual. It happened from time to time. People just walked in and said that was it. I shook everyone’s hand and they all said I was lucky, getting out, that they envied me, and I felt a little ashamed, as if I was betraying them. A part of me felt that I did not deserve to escape, but another part knew I was ready to go. Burnett and I walked to the locker room together.
“So, what’ll you do now,” he asked as I emptied my locker. “Follow your brother? Go to med school?”
“I doubt it.”
“What then?”
“Spend time with Emily.”
“Live on bread and water, I guess.”
“I got money saved.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know.”
“When that runs out, what’ll you do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll live a different sort of life.”
“Well, I’m glad, Frank.”
I was surprised he said that.
“You could do something else. The only reason why any of us’re here is because we have to be. Because we have no choice.”
I was going through my locker, taking the most important things. I left the uniform, the boots. Burnett was standing there with his arms crossed. He reached out and shook my hand vigorously.
“You were a lotta fuckin trouble, Frank. But you kept it interesting. Good luck.”
“Good luck to you.”
There was no pretense of exchanging numbers. We knew we would not keep in touch. I put my bag on my shoulder and walked to the door. I glanced back. He was checking his watch against the time on the clock. One bare bulb lit the aisle of lockers and Burnett’s shadow was large and distorted against the far wall.
68
Emily and I were north of Portsmouth in a rented car when we picked up two hitchhikers standing beneath a viaduct— Mexicans on their way to Bangor. One was skinny and talkative, leaning forward with his arm over the front seat, the other was big boned and muscular. He hardly said a word. He’d just gotten out of prison.
“Two years,” the smaller one said. “Two fuckin years. Wasn’t even his wife.” The bigger one bristled. The little guy was quiet for a moment, then said in a gentler voice, “Come on, you gotta admit it was stupid. Two whole years. Not even your wife. All because he stuck his pinga in her.”
The bigger one looked over at us.
“I didn’t kill him,” he said.
“Just almost did,” the other said. “Right? All because—”
The bigger one looked over sharply. The little one started on a different tack.
“Was it worth it? Could it’ve been worth it?”
“Yeah. It was,” the bigger one said, not turning, and just kept looking out the window. We dropped them off in Bangor and kept north and near the border we turned onto an old logging road. There were pines on either side, and a stream that we could not see but that we could hear running through trees on the left. Sometimes at the crests of hills, looking to the east, we saw the blue line of the ocean. The road ended in a clearing on a grassy hill and I drove the car right onto the field. We could hear the tall grass scraping the bottom of the car. There was an abandoned horse-drawn plow nearby but no other cars. Balsam firs lined the clearing. It was twenty degrees cooler than in New York. Emily picked a two-foot blade of grass and sat on the old plow. I walked away from the car and lay in the grass and looked at the sky. It felt good to be out of the city. It felt good not to have a job, to be able to do whatever I wanted. It had been two years since I’d been out of Manhattan for more than a day. I’d gotten the job straight out of college, and before that I’d been taking care of my father whenever he was sick. It seemed like I’d been a kid when I’d last felt that sort of comfort and freedom, and it made me a little sad to feel it. Like making a discovery of something too late. I could have brought Emily out here while she was still healthy, I thought. But she didn’t seem to mind.
“Should we have lived in a place like this?” she asked.
“We still can,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me, Frank. If I had longer maybe I would. It seems obvious this is better. But it feels empty to me. I don’t know why. Is beauty empty? Is there something hollow about prettiness?”
“I don’t know.”
“I feel something hollow,” she said.
The sun got lower. We stuffed our sleeping bags and some dry food and water into the backpack and hiked in through spruce, pine, and fir trees. We were in a small state park and the ocean was less than an hour away. As we got closer to the water the air grew colder, and when we heard the sound of surf we stopped and I stretched out our sleeping bag. We both lay down with the smell of needles and salt and the faint sound of waves. The sun lowered slowly, and we lay there among the tall straight trees, which rocked separately in the wind, and hushed way up. The ground was thick with pine needles, and in all that world of green, copper, and reddish-brown bark our bodies were the only white things to see. She kept her eyes open looking at me the whole time.
Afterward we lay side by side with the trees stretching above us, the slanting yellow light. The sound of the ocean was faint. Emily had a long blade of grass in her teeth, looking up with one hand beneath her head.
“This is how you should remember me.”
“It’s not like you aren’t going to be around awhile.”
The grass twitched in the corner of her mouth. She didn’t bother denying it. She just lay there, looking up.
“Are you afraid?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
“I am, too,” I said.
“It’s easier together,” she said. “At least I know someone’s going to care.”
We walked down to the beach in the dusky light. We lay in the same sleeping bag with the huge waves pounding the rocky beach. We could see the white of the surf, and very clearly hear the foam sizzling as it rushed onto the shore. I slept for only four or five hours but when I woke it was already the gray light of dawn. Mist was coming off the water. The sleeping bag was covered with dew. There were little droplets on Emily’s hair. I sat up. Emily was breathing very slightly. I watched her for a long time and then I got up and walked to the shore. You could see four or five lines of waves at any one time, all coming in parallel to one another. Gray water on gray rocks. I walked alone along the rocky beach for an
hour and when I came back the sleeping bag was empty. I saw Emily from a half-mile away. She was walking down the beach slowly, holding her shoes. We met near the sodden ashes of a dead fire, one log washed up several feet. Emily was shivering. She walked past me, then turned and came up next to me, leaned into me.
“We have to go back,” she said.
“We just left.”
“I wanted to see this one more time. To be here. Now I’ve had that. It’s time for me to go home.”
We walked slowly back to camp, and slowly we packed. I carried everything we’d brought, but as we wound our way up the cliff we had to stop three times until Emily stopped coughing.
69
Enormous chunks of crumbling concrete, rusting tire rails, spikes, cable, white gravel, toppled fences, weeds. It was two weeks later and Emily and I were on the Brooklyn side of the East River in a squalid area of abandoned warehouses and old factories and shipyards in disrepair. I was trying to take photographs in a new way, with a gentler tone. Something I had not done before. As we walked, we saw a man with a beard carrying a brown cardboard box, which he tilted toward us. Twenty green turtles scrabbled at its smooth edges with dry claws. The man spoke with a Russian accent.
“You want one maybe? Wanna turtle?”
Safelight Page 14
