The Superman Project

by A. E. Roman

  “From heaven, you will continue to be an example of true sweetness,” said a kid who identified himself only as Frank. Between shouts of Que vaina que vaina, and tears, he left the stage.

  A singing duo called Justice and Judge ended the memorial service with a rendition of the Celia Cruz song “Yo Viviré.” I will live.

  “I’m dying of thirst,” a voice said.

  I looked up and saw Pablo.

  “Can we talk?” said Pablo.

  I followed him into an office full of dodgeballs, volleyballs, basketballs, soccer balls, board games, folding chairs and folding tables, blue floor mats, ESL and GED workbooks, and musical instruments.

  He closed the door, wiping his tears, and said, “Thank you for coming, Chico.”

  The door opened again.

  A young man peeked in. I recognized him. It was the same young man (about five-foot eleven, 117 pounds, about eighteen) that I saw wandering Washington Heights in rags, weeping and pulling a shopping cart and skinny pit bull on the street. He had cleaned himself up, washed his dark face, blew out his Afro, even shaved, and was wearing a green suit that almost fit his long limbs, for Esther Sanchez’s memorial.

  “Can I help you, Yayo?” Pablo said.

  Yayo stared at Pablo as if pleading for a moment alone, shook his head sadly, and sulked out of the room.

  “Yayo is completely helpless,” said Pablo. “I don’t know what happened to him. He was a great artist once. In high school. Better than Elvis. Maybe even better than Joey. That kid was legend.”

  “What happened?”

  “Drugs.”

  “He looks good today.”

  “Today,” said Pablo. “Tomorrow is another day. Everybody’s pretty much given up on Yayo. Except my mother. My mother treated him like he was related to us, like he was one of her sons.”

  “She was good people, huh?”

  “She was a sucker,” Pablo Sanchez said, wiping more tears. “She couldn’t just save herself. It’s a family thing.”

  Then Pablo Sanchez smiled, remembering the imaginary golden past where everything was simpler in the musty air of the Community Center office. “My mother used to play Bingo at the Audubon Ballroom. Go see movies at the San Juan Spanish movie theater on 166th. Did you know that Freddie Prinze—the father, not the son—grew up on 155th Street?”

  “No.”

  “He was Puerto Rican like you, and Hungarian. Tiny Tim grew up here, too.”

  As a rule, I am allergic to trips down memory lane. All that talk about the good old days leaves me cold. It always has. But Pablo was in pain over the death of his mother.

  “And Henry Kissinger, and Harry Belafonte, and Alan Greenspan, and Manny Ramírez, the baseball player, they all went to George Washington High School, right in this neighborhood. My mother would tell me stories about Nelson’s Deli at 170th and Broadway, Tasty Pastry Bakery on Broadway, Greenspan’s Luggage, Merit Farms. She grew up here before all the Italians and Irish and Jews started moving away. In those days, she said, somebody might chase you down the street after school with a knife, or cut your coat, or beat you if you didn’t want to join their gang. But they wouldn’t kill you, shoot you with a gun, the way these bastards do now.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The golden age.”

  “Don’t mock me, Chico.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s a reflex.”

  “I didn’t get involved with drugs and stuff like Yayo when I was a kid,” said Pablo proudly. “I could have. I was too independent.”

  “Did you hear from Joey?”

  Pablo got out his asthma pump. “No.”

  I heard a commotion coming from outside, someone yelling, “Police!”

  I ran out of the office, Pablo on my tail.

  SIXTEEN

  The NYPD had found the murder weapon, a bloody knife marked Michael Jordan’s Steak House, in Yayo’s shopping cart and arrested him for the murder of Esther Sanchez. His old gray New Balance sneaker footprints matched the prints found at the crime scene. There were two sets of bloody footprints. One set belonged to Elvis. The other set belonged to Yayo. Yayo did it. Killed a kindhearted woman who offered him shelter, food, and pocket money in the past. For drug money.

  Yayo told the police only that he had been in the apartment, had found Esther, had taken the knife out of her back because he felt terrible, realized she was dead and what he had done by touching a murder weapon, and left the apartment taking the murder weapon and a cell phone with him to buy drugs, but swore up and down that he was not the killer of Esther Sanchez.

  Samantha even got me a quick interview with Yayo at Rikers: “You’re not lying to me, are you?”

  “I swear by my dead mother and my dead sister,” Yayo said. “The front door was open. I found her like like that. I didn’t do it.”

  Yayo’s mother and sister died six months apart from one another. Yayo took to drinking and then drugs, lost his job as a computer graphics designer, then his apartment, and then he took to walking the street. But everybody in the Heights was saying how he was a good, smart kid, trying to get off the street with Esther Sanchez’s help. Word on the street was that Yayo couldn’t have done it and the real killer was out there free.

  No matter.

  Elvis got sprung.

  Yayo got jailed.

  Them’s the breaks.

  But Gabby Gupta was still missing and so I still wanted to take a look at Utopia Farms where she kept an art studio. It was hot outside. Zena was tense and sitting in the driver’s seat of her Mini Cooper, blasting the air conditioner. Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” played on the car radio.

  “For five long years, I thought you were my man . . .”

  Zena was wearing a white blouse, bell-bottom jeans, and brown sandals, her flamboyant nest of black hair draped across her beautiful shoulders.

  But don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t in love. I was still working a case.

  Sure, I was almost happy for the moment looking out the car window at the bright lights of New York City at night, my head full of the possibility of Zena, not thinking of Joey Valentin or of murder, but dreaming of a happy ending. The only thing that made me nervous was that I had just found the fourth knife. The fourth knife marked Michael Jordan’s Steak House in Zena’s glove compartment with a bunch of other junk. She also kept a packed suitcase in the backseat of her car, as she said, for the last year because she had thoughts of leaving poor Hari once and for all.

  Other than that, nothing suspicious at all.

  Maybe it was nothing.

  Maybe.

  Right.

  But when Zena pressed my hand, looking at her heart-shaped lips, every doubt about her almost flowed from me like river water into a vast ocean of sweet forget.

  I wanted to forget.

  Who was I kidding?

  “You’re married, Zena,” I finally said. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Looking for my sister.”

  “I’m talking about your husband,” I said. “Hari.”

  “He told me he saw you at the apartment.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Awkward.”

  “I thought he was going to be at Utopia Farms for the weekend, packing stuff up.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “The English,” Zena said, “have this thing, an arrangement really, called companionate marriage, which is not based on passion and sex but on two people who love and care for each other and love each other’s company. They make a nice, quiet life together. That’s what Hari and I have. If you believe, as my father preaches, that marriage is a long conversation, Hari and I just don’t speak the same language. And after his accident, things became physically impossible between me and Hari. But neither of us liked the idea of divorce. And my father was dead set against it. Hari made me promise that if I ever did anything, it wouldn’t be with an artist. No unemployed writers, actors, dancers. Just an ordinary TSP member. And then you walk into TSP. I saw you with that wanker Kirsten, starin
g at me. I saw how she looked at you, and how you looked at me. Maybe I just wanted to take you away from that blabbermouth. Hari’s not my husband in the traditional sense.”

  “Why did you marry him?”

  “My father thought it was a good idea that I marry an older man. My sister Gabby introduced us. Everyone at TSP thought it was a good idea. They thought that Hari would be good for me, calm me down. I used to be a little bit wild. Kryptonic.”

  “Now?”

  “Less,” she said, and bit into her lower lip.

  “You married Hari because your father and TSP thought it was a good idea?”

  “My father is Indian, Chico. Indians still practice arranged marriage. Yes, the idea is considered crazy in this country, but the divorce rate here is over fifty percent. So who is the crazy one? Romance is an invention of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that didn’t catch on until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, really. And Romeo and Juliet died in that play by William Shakespeare.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My bloody point is that American women who think men have changed for the worse forget that marriage was once about livestock and property, women were owned by men. In India, not so long ago, when a man died, his wife was killed and buried with him. So we’ve come a long way. But I know that I must make the rules for the kind of life I want. The old models are dead with wool suits and girdles, and good riddance. I’m no bloody romantic.”

  “You contradict yourself a lot,” I said. “One minute you believe in faith and giving yourself only to The Superman and the next—”

  “I contradict myself.” Zena grinned. “Problem?”

  “That’s a kind of consistency, I guess.”

  “Or not,” said Zena and looked out the car window. “There they are.”

  When I next looked out of the car window, I spotted Elvis Hernandez standing on the corner of Broadway and 163rd Street, outside of a bodega marked Hernandez Grocery Center.

  Chase and Elvis were arguing.

  As we pulled closer to the bodega, I saw that Chase Gupta, holding a take-out bag that said Punta Cana Restaurant, was wearing her fifty shades of eye shadow, still short, still brown, still lovely and fat. Elvis was holding a green cooler. He was a man transformed, in a loose-fitting red linen suit with no collar, no socks, and blue leather sandals. As we pulled up he yelled, “The Buddha of El Barrio, baby!”

  Chase wore another short skirt wrapped around her enormous legs, gold sandals, one gold ring, under a new short black leather jacket.

  It was a humid eighty degrees that night.

  “Welcome to Washington Heights,” said Elvis, jumping into the backseat. I noticed that he was wearing Chase’s diamond-encrusted watch. “My name is Elvis. I protect those who come here.”

  “What’s in the cooler?” I asked.

  “Cerveza,” Elvis said. “You can’t go investigating without beer.”

  “We don’t allow beer at the farm, Elvis,” said Zena. “You’ll never become TSP president doing that.”

  “I’m a Budweiser man,” said Elvis. “Baby steps.”

  As Chase squeezed into the backseat of the car, she yelled, “Elvis, I’m warning you. You’re the love of my life, but you have low standards. You’d better stop kissing that lousy filthy Jew’s ass.”

  Zena shook her head and said, “What are you going on about now, Chase?”

  “That stupid slag of a lawyer. That Jewish bitch who keeps calling Elvis on his cell phone.”

  Zena sighed, looked at me, and said wearily, “When you go off like that about Jews, Chase, people get the wrong impression. You sound like an anti-Semite.”

  “How can I be an anti-Semite?” Chase barked. “My mother was Jewish. She was an English Jew, not a low-class Polish Jew like that slag of a lawyer from Park Slope. That stupid, aggressive, obnoxious, always-in-your-face bitch. In India she would be a farmer or an Untouchable.”

  Chase turned to me and said, “Zena doesn’t like understand that there’s two kinds of people in the world: farmers and merchants. Farmer types act in a low-class way, like those Pakistani dot heads in Queens wearing kurtas and chappals, saris and churidars, who give modern desis a bad name. Merchants tend to act in higher-class ways. When I talk about that Jewish slag of a public defender that was helping Elvis while he was in jail, I’m talking about a certain type of Jew. The kind my mother always warned us about.”

  “Well,” said Zena, “I don’t care. I don’t like stereotypes.”

  “Stereotypes are like so true, Zena,” said Chase. “Irish people are drunks. Italians are Mafia. Black people steal. Puerto Ricans bring cockroaches.”

  Elvis looked at me and smiled and winked as Chase went on. “Indians stink. Jews are cheap. Polish people are stupid. Chinese are sneaky. Not everybody. Not all of them. But like a lot. I mean, I’m Indian and I don’t stink but a lot of them do. You can’t argue with the truth.”

  Zena rolled her eyes.

  Chase held up a brown cigarette and said, “Anybody mind the smell of cloves?”

  Zena looked at her, disappointed. “You’re still smoking those Djarums?”

  “I know,” Chase said. “Disgusting habit. Illegal. The worst. Anybody mind?”

  “No,” said Elvis. “Light up.”

  Elvis tapped a Newport cigarette out of a crumpled pack and offered me one.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Elvis,” Zena scolded. “Smoking is Kryptonic behavior.”

  “Give it a rest, little sister,” said Chase, as if she were more than just a year older than Zena, cracking the window a bit.

  “You’ll never make it back into the program at this rate, Elvis,” said Zena. “I’m taking notes.”

  Chase opened her mouth wide, as if to say something.

  Elvis put an arm around Chase, kissed her.

  “Elvis is like my little merchant in training, Chico,” said Chase, easing up. “My little Superman and I love him. Zena’s just jealous.” Then she and Elvis went into a long, passionate round of sloppy tongue kissing that sounded like my dog Boo lapping up water, while Zena made a disgusted face. Somewhere over the George Washington Bridge, I heard: “Where do you live, Chico?”

  I looked back at Chase. “I live in the Bronx on Parkchester with a little girl, a Chihuahua named Boo, and a three-legged cat called Gizmo.”

  “A three-legged cat?” yelled Chase. “Like ewww!”

  “I kept a wounded pigeon once,” Zena said and patted my hand sweetly.

  “Are you going to kill it?” said Chase.

  “What?”

  “Kill it,” Chase said. “Put that three-legged cat like out of its misery. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Zena shook her head furiously.

  “I’m like serious,” Chase said, looking at me. “Life is for the strong. Life should be worth living. That’s what my father, I mean, Father Ravi or whatever teaches, no?”

  Zena stopped the car suddenly and we screeched along the highway. The car came to a slow halt as horns blared and car lights zoomed past. Zena turned on her younger sister.

  “Who are you to decide what’s worth living?”

  “Zena?” Chase pleaded, putting up her hands in surrender. “It’s like just a cat. Take it easy.”

  Zena stared at Chase. “You know what your problem is, Chase?”

  “What, Zena the wise child?”

  “You don’t know what’s good, Chase.”

  Chase frowned, folded her arms under her enormous breasts, and leaned against Elvis, who put a lanky arm around as much of her as he could.

  “Enough, little Zena,” said Chase.

  Zena glanced at Elvis and smirked. “The beginning of wisdom, Chase, is knowing what is and isn’t necessary. The house of wisdom is a tall house with long, winding halls, and most of us are dead before we even reach the doorknob.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is that you don’t even care if the doorknob exists.”

>   “Now who sounds like her control-freak mother, little sister?” Chase said.

  “I’m wasting my breath,” said Zena.

  “Exactly,” said Chase. “But it never seems to stop you or Mara.”

  Zena looked at me. “Is that cat happy, Chico?”

  “He seems happy to me,” I said.

  “Good. Is that all right with you, Chase? Can we let Gizmo the cat live? Even if he only has three legs? Even if he is a cripple? Is that okay with you?”

  “A cripple,” Chase said almost in a whisper, and bowed her head, as if realizing what was behind Zena’s sudden fury. “Aw, Zena. I didn’t mean Hari. What’re you like saying? What kind of person do you think I am? I was just philosophizing. I would never actually kill a living creature.”

  Then she got angry. “I can’t believe you would even like suggest that I’m talking about Hari.”

  Then she yelled, “Apologize, Zena!”

  I signaled for Elvis, who was just watching the exchange between the Gupta sisters with a quiet smirk on his face. Elvis leaned in front of Chase to stop anything from going down. Chase allowed him to do so; if she had wanted to, I think she could have easily bowled Elvis over, passed through me, and snapped her little sister Zena like a twig in the jaws of a rhino.

  “Zena,” said Elvis, holding down Chase’s massive arms. “Let’s not fight. We’re all on the same side here, mamá.”

  “Very bloody well,” Zena said, sitting very still and facing the road now, talking real slow, like a warning. “I accept you, Chase, the way I accepted Mother, in a very unconditional way. And I love my sisters, the way I loved her. But sometimes you say stupid things. I’m not interested in your daft ideas about types of Jews or Hindus or Muslims or Untouchables or any of your petty little prejudices. I’m going up to Utopia Farms to help find Gabby, to help Chico, and to breathe fresh bloody country air for two minutes. But if you keep spewing your nonsense, I swear to God we’ll turn back to New York City and drop you off on the nearest corner, I’m serious.”

  “I see,” Chase said, and sat back, with a quiet but vicious look on her dark face.

  There was a vengeance in her silence.

  SEVENTEEN