She not going to follow him. She’s not, but he sees him reach into his pocket and pull out something, the fruit knife, the one from his drawing. What’s he going to do?
She shouts after him, runs past all the people looking at them and up the stone steps, sees him disappear into one of the rooms, and follows.
Joel, New York — 2010
Central Park in spring and everything looked new. The day’s pale light picked out the buds and branches, sketching them on the grass, on the wooden benches, on the spongy tarmac of the Mall underfoot. Kids running round in expanding arcs, the trundling of serious-faced skateboarders, a dog walker’s forearms tensed against a bunch of straining leashes, and a jogger approaching, waving away a fly in front of her face. All new.
Joel could smell the newness, like freshly laundered sheets and hard, striped candy. Somewhere across the park a guy was playing the sax; a distant music, not really music but a free-form honk and squeal, irritating and difficult to ignore. He counted down the line of trees as he walked to push the squawking out of his head, right up until he stopped and sat on the bench, when the saxophone burrowed into him again.
He stretched an arm out along the wooden backrest and traced with his finger the outline of the daisy carved into it. The benches had these flowers all along them, and Joel loved their simplicity, like a child’s drawing. He loved how they were smoothed and warmed by years of human contact and thought of all the people from the past who’d stroked them, as he did. He felt totally secure on the curve of this bench in front of the bandstand’s small plaza. It was his favourite spot in the whole park and that’s why he’d chosen it for today.
Around the plaza, a dreadlocked in-line skater was executing wide, graceful loops. His bright orange bodysuit and matching helmet, his muscular certainty, sparked an image, of Apollo, driving his chariot across the sky. He took out his notebook. He wrote, Apollo Skates in Central Park. A title? Or a first line, maybe? Joel wrote down the word ‘resplendent’, — the only word for this guy — and, then… then, nothing. His ability to think of anything beyond a fragmented image had left him a while back, maybe for good. He still carried his notebook and pencil everywhere, though these days they acted only as hostile witnesses to his great doubt, gave testimony to his inability to produce anything worthwhile.
Why had he suggested that he and Sophie go see this bullshit movie together? Because it was about her favourite painter that’s why, and he wanted her to know that he still knew that. Then she’d said, “Let’s go to the Museum first, to the Cézanne rooms,” because the Met were doing a cut-price-ticket/movie-tie-in.
Oh, and it was starring, of all people, Marius Woolf — “Isn’t that an amazing coincidence? — the actor who’d bought her first show, who’d bank-rolled them for basically two whole years as well as paying for their modest, secret wedding.
He heard that saxophone again and, somewhere, a kid crying. A firm sting pricked the back of his hand and he looked down to see, not some angry insect, but that he was jabbing the point of the pencil into it. He stopped himself, licked the welt he’d made, to soothe it.
A woman came and sat on the bench further along. She was pulling an empty buggy with one hand and gripping a little boy’s arm with the other, pleading softly with him. “C’mon sweetie, you’re just tired. Drink your juice, c’mon.”
The kid squirmed and pulled away to stand a few paces back from her. She glanced up at Joel who gave her a sympathetic smile, and she rolled her eyes in response. The boy turned to look at him, licking snot and tears from his top lip, then tottered towards him, looking back at his mom the whole time, as if testing the limits she’d set to the approaching of strangers.
“Hey buddy,” Joel said. He’d help this kid and his mom, try to close the gap between the two of them. From his notebook he tore the page with his scratched, useless words on it, placed the paper on top of the carved wooden daisy, and began to rub his pencil over it.
The boy drew nearer as he worked, watching the flower emerge like a magic trick. When Joel finished he held it out to him, but he turned to his mom — there was the kid’s limit, Joel thought. He’s a good kid. When his mom nodded, he came forward to take it.
“It’s a flower,” Joel said. “See?” The boy grasped the wondrous piece of paper unsmiling. “It’s for your mom,” Joel said. “Go give your mom the flower.”
In a burst of confident relief, he trotted across to her, holding the paper up and out. “Oh thank you honey,” she said, taking it from him. “Did you say thank you?”
The boy shook his head, clambered into the buggy and shoved the juice cup into his mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said, stroking her son’s sleepy head. “He’s crabby today. He’s usually very polite.”
“No problem,” Joel said. “I have one of my own. About the same age. A girl.”
“Ah, I thought you might be a dad.”
Joel didn’t want to talk to this nice woman about being a dad, didn’t want to answer questions about his daughter, his divorce, custody arrangements, shared parenting. He didn’t want her to know his marriage to Sophie had fallen apart right after Imogen was born. He wanted her to think he was a great father and a husband who took good care of his family, not some dick who’d thrown away his only chance at happiness.
From his buggy the boy studied him, struggling now to keep his eyes open. Joel fought the same sensation, as if the kid’s tired stress was infectious. Christ, he was exhausted. He wanted to shut everything out and go to sleep, but he mustn’t do that. He had to be alert for when Sophie arrived.
Four years down the line he was still putting himself through this shit. He should have just jacked off in the shower this morning and gotten her out of his system, rinsing her down the plughole with his load. He screwed his eyes shut and shook his head at the ugly thought. It had been his idea, hadn’t it, to go to the movies?
He screwed up the notebook in his lap and threw it at the trashcan by the bench. It missed the target and dropped to the floor. “Best place for it,” he said.
The woman got up and, tucking things away in the bottom of the buggy, walked off down the Mall. Joel tried to catch her eye to give her a goodbye smile, but she was avoiding his gaze, he was sure. He was a muttering freak, throwing his stuff at the trash like that. He wouldn’t want to sit near him neither, especially not with a kid. He gripped the pencil, his knuckles hard as bullets, to stop himself from calling out after her.
Instead, he directed his attention back to Apollo, whirling around the plaza, faster now and backwards, one leg crossing behind the other, a couple of dreadlocks stuck to his sweat-sheened cheek. The efficient regularity of his smooth glide was beautifully calming and Joel relaxed the hand that was tingling, visualised the blood flowing back into his fingers.
The pencil’s gold lettering had worn down to almost nothing, its red covering chipped and totally gone in places. He bit down on it, breaking off a slither of wood that he rolled around in his mouth. It tasted of something over and done with, something dead. It was not like the wood of the bench, which still had something to offer, some support.
He’d brought with him her copy of Annie Yeung’s Shadow is a Colour as Light is, which she thought was lost, but which he had taken, hidden, and kept as a talisman of sorts. More than a reminder of Sophie it was a part of her. He’d known how much she’d be upset at losing it, and he wanted her to feel that loss. But today, he was going to give it back to her.
He’d said to her, “I’ll be on the curve of the bench, opposite the bandstand, just like old times,” that last bit a joke, but he hadn’t thought how it might make her feel to meet him there, or how it would make him feel either. “Revisiting old friends,” he’d said, meaning the paintings, but she could’ve assumed he thought of her only as a friend now and that was the direction they’d take from this moment on, as decided by him.
Three years ago, almost to the day, Joel and Sophie had married after being together just ten months
, and they’d done it without telling anyone.
According to his father, whose language when it came to Joel turned old-school and florid, it was ‘an act of indescribable folly in this day and age’ to marry someone so soon after meeting, ‘unless you have to’, as if it had been ten days not ten months, as if anyone had to get married in this day and age. It was also ‘preposterous and harebrained’ of them to start a family the year after that, when they were both only twenty-five, struggling to make ends meet and neither of them established in their careers (‘if you can have such a thing as a career in poetry’). But Joel didn’t care, and neither did Sophie.
At every stage they’d told themselves, each other, their friends, her parents, his father, that they knew exactly what they were getting into. If Joel’s dad had known exactly what they were planning he would have coerced him into calling the whole thing off, but Joel had been willing to defy him and face the consequences, strong enough to do that for the first time in his life.
He managed to convince Sophie that what they were doing was romantic, exciting even. “Imagine what a story we’ll have to tell our grandkids,” he’d said.
Sophie had waved the kitchen knife at him, with which she was chopping scallions. “Joel, there won’t be any grandkids if your dad cuts your balls off.”
As far as she knew at this point, Joel’s father was stern and somewhat scary. This was before she’d been introduced to him. She didn’t yet know the extent to which he terrified Joel, or that what she had done by loving Joel and making him feel loved, was give him the power to say no to him, and the faith to believe that, whatever revenge he took, as long as he had Sophie he could survive it.
In the end his father capitulated, or so Joel had thought, but, in reality, he was merely biding his time before the moment when it all collapsed and he could gloat over the ruins. And it was only a matter of time before he and Sophie would realise their grand, stupid mistake in thinking love was enough to see them through, that the landscape of their marriage could survive the catastrophe of being planted in toxic soil, irrigated by poisoned water.
Then, after they split, it was, according to his dad, ‘imbecilic’ of them to divorce so quickly after their separation. Joel could hear him now, his performed anger barely masking his genuine, cynical amusement: “Christ sakes Poop, marriage isn’t something you just try out!”
Poop was what his father had called Joel since he was little. He’d told Sophie that it was short for Nincompoop, when she’d blinked in surprise on hearing it, but this was another one of his lies. Truth was, the nickname stemmed from a particular incident that took place when Joel was seven years old.
He’d made a noise when coming down the stairs — not a loud noise, or an annoying noise, just a noise that, for his father at that particular time and when he was in a certain mood, was ‘totally unacceptable’. Joel was instructed to sit in absolute silence, on a hard wooden chair in his father’s study, in order to ‘learn some self-control’.
After one whole hour, Joel had grown so stiff, his ass so sore, that he’d started to cry, but crying was noise, so the punishment must begin all over again. Having had no breakfast, he’d gotten so hungry he thought he was going to pass out. The only thing that kept him conscious was the discomfort he started to experience once he needed to use the bathroom. He didn’t dare ask to be excused because speaking, he knew, was also noise. Eventually, inevitably, he’d pissed himself all over the rug in his father’s study and then shit his pants in terror. But, rather than re-start the clock, as Joel anticipated, there’d been a different torture in store.
Joel was due at a school friend’s birthday lunch. At the appointed time his father dragged Joel to the party in his soiled clothes, forcing him onto the subway, too, for added humiliation. Joel reeked of shit the whole time, and desperately hoped no one could fathom where the stench came from. But they could — he saw by the looks of disgust on their faces.
At the lunch party, his father had behaved normally, chit-chatting with the other parents as if there was nothing amiss, purposefully ignoring the same screwed-up nose and wrinkled brow expressions they’d witnessed on the subway, while Joel played with the other kids, himself pretending nothing was up in an effort to placate his dad, who might take him home immediately if he played along, showed he’d learned his lesson.
The total disgust the moment his stink reached the other party guests, all classmates of his, was the worst torture of all and, eventually, one of the kids had finally lost it with him, shouting “Get lost, Poop!” as Joel approached. His father thought this was ‘priceless, just priceless!’ and so took to using it himself.
A year into their marriage, Sophie became pregnant and Joel’s growing anticipation of the baby’s arrival unlocked sensations he’d thought were suppressed completely. He couldn’t trust himself, or the shaming rage that spilled out into his notebooks, pouring beyond the confines of the ruled margin, the soft cover.
He developed a paranoid, insomniac fear of the kind of father he would turn out to be, despite himself. Lying awake in the night, he would visualise losing control and his heart would palpate with anxiety. There’d be something one day — a last straw, a tether’s end — and he’d imagine, like a fragment of film playing over and over in his mind’s eye, an arm lashing out, smashing, slamming, the child skidding, sprawling across the floor, full of tears, screaming, the soundtrack to his own silent rage. He was a monster in the making and began to wish the baby away before it was born.
But when Imogen arrived, he very quickly fell totally in love with her, quicker even than he’d fallen in love with Sophie, which could only mean she had to be protected from him. He did this by shunning her, completely and utterly. Implacable he was in the face of his beautiful wife’s crying recriminations, and after barely two years of marriage, when Imogen was just eleven months old, Sophie had finally accepted what a low-life piece of shit he was, and left.
Joel was jabbing at his inner arm now, with his pencil again. this had been happening more and more often the past few months. He needed to move, so pulled himself up from the bench and went over to where his notebook lay splayed on the ground, picked it up and wiped the grime off it, onto his jeans.
The sick-sweet stench of rotting fruit from the trashcan cut through the light, the noise, his smarting arm, its tang smothering Joel. He heard his father voice, ordering him to eat the mouldy fruit he had taken from the kitchen garbage and presented him with as evidence of his son’s ‘sheer, disgusting, wastefulness’, which would ‘not be tolerated’.
He thought he might chuck up and took some deep breaths, moved away from the trash.
The skating Apollo skid-halted in front of him and began to execute a slow, tight spin, then speeding up, speeding up, a whirling orange sun, the light from him blinding Joel all of a sudden, who dropped to the ground hot then cold then hot again.
Apollo’s reviving voice came through, low and easy. “Hey man, whassup down there? You okay?”
“Just a bit — fuzzy — s’all,” Joel managed to say.
“Yeah, I have days like that too. Let me help you there.”
Apollo held out both hands and Joel took them. Even on wheels he was strong enough to support Joel back onto his feet and help him to the bench.
“Can I get you somethin’? Some water maybe?”
Joel shook his head. “D’you know what? I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Okay then. Take it easy my man.” With that, Apollo swivelled away to resume his flight.
Joel slotted his notebook back in his pocket, and the pencil too that had rolled underneath the bench when he collapsed. He rubbed his hands, red and smarting from his fall, and the residue of Apollo’s sure, dry touch.
Walter & Jeffrey, Hong Kong — 2013
Walter lies in bed, quite, quite still. He breathes deeply, calmly. The music had almost sent him to sleep but he thinks it was the camera’s warning bleep that disturbed his meditation. Or perhaps merely that sense one has of be
ing looked at, the one that turns your head in a crowded room. Either way, Jeffrey must be watching him.
Walter was aware of his son’s surveillance capabilities even before he’d put them into action. Chief Security Officer, Gordon Li, had informed him of Jeffrey’s plan to hack into CantoCorp’s network of cameras the instant the transfer of money he had been offered landed in his bank account. It was the proof Li needed of the bribe his employer’s son had proposed to him in return for his cooperation.
Walter insisted Li keep the money he had wanted to return and tripled his already generous salary as reward for his loyalty. Li would continue in his Security Chief role, having won Jeffrey’s trust, and it was he who persuaded Walter to let Jeffrey press ahead with his plan, when Walter’s initial, outraged reaction had been to cease his son’s access to all computing facilities immediately and indefinitely.
“With respect, Mister Yeung,” Li had advised him, “should you do that I fear you may lose your son permanently, and forever.” Li had actually placed a hand on Walter’s arm to stop him lifting the phone into which he would have given the order. No one else would have dared, but, given how it has all turned out, it proved to be a priceless intervention.
Walter’s anger had subsided, replaced with a grudging admiration for his son’s audacity and technical know-how. He was also mollified by the thought of Jeffrey wanting to see him and even hoped that, eventually, the cameras might bring them back together. He was wrong about that, but having lost one son already, as long as Jeffrey remained with him, he had a link to Walter Junior and Annie, as well as some fragment of hope for the future. So he’d allowed Li to carry on working with Jeffrey and Li even came up with the idea of the warning bleep on the cameras, to alert him when he was being watched. As the camera system had no sound, Jeffrey would never know and, over time, Walter came to imagine that Jeffrey was surveying him always. That way, he could perform every action he made for his son, a sort of controlled improvisation, or augmented reality.
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