I just saw, that’s all, I tell them. Lucky.
“Where you ever learn all that martial arts shit?”
No martial arts, I tell them, no exotic fighting technique, I was just irritated—which makes them laugh shakily, and breaks the tension. Beyond that, I talk to them as little as I can, my voice still something unpracticed, oddly wrong. They do most of the talking, anyway, so glad merely to be alive.
I do walk them all the way to their apartment house—they are cousins, living with their grandmother—and they both hug me with all their strength when we say good-bye. The older girl says earnestly, “I’m going to pray for you every night,” and I thank her. They both wave back to me as they run into the building.
I am glad the darkness did not snatch me away while I was with them: my vanishing before their eyes would surely have terrified them, and they have been frightened enough for one night. And I am glad to have at least a moment to be a who, fumbling and confused, before I must once again be an invincible what, taken down from the wall and aimed at some new target.
This time, when the darkness takes me … this time my memory remains whole, clear, unhazy. Everything is still there: nothing tattered or smudged, gone. The two black girls stay with me. I remember them, even things they said to each other about the movie they had just seen, and their telling me that their grandmother worked in a school cafeteria. And from there I remember more, though I have no sure way of measuring when any of it happened. The drunken old man stumbling in front of a bus … the two toddlers playing on a rusty, sagging fire escape on a hot night … the children driving so slowly down a wide trash-strewn street, training a pistol through the passenger window on another child who has just come out of a liquor store … the woman looking behind her into a stir of shadows, walking a little faster …
And each time—me. Rescuer. Savior. Wrath of God … somehow fortunately there at just the right moment; there, where I am necessary. But where is there?
I am beginning to know. It is a city—how big a city I cannot guess—and there is a river I almost remember swimming … yes, the children. (What happened to the third one?) There is a street or two that I have come to recognize. A handful of buildings that give me some kind of bearing as I hurry past on this or that night’s mission. One particular row of crowded, crumbling houses has become almost familiar, as have a few shops, a few street corners, a few markets—even a face, now and then …
This city, then, is where I live.
No. This is where I am.
They live, but I am only real. There is a difference I cannot name …
outside an apartment door with bright brass numerals on it—4 and 2 and 9; for the first time they are more than shapes to me—my leg in mid-snap, heel of my foot slamming once, just under the lock, breaking cheap wood away from dead bolt and mortise to give me entry. And there they are, the pair of them, sitting together on a couch, his eyes all pupil, the skin of her arms covered with deep scratches. I have seen that before.
This time I could not care less about it. I am here for the baby.
Hallway, door on the right. Closed, but I can hear the whimpering, even though the man is on his feet, making outraged noises, and the woman—pretty, once—is telling him to call nine-one-one. I pay no heed to either of them, not yet. No time, no time.
I can smell the urine even before I have opened the door. He’s soaked, and the mattress is soaked, and the blanket, but that’s not what stops my breath. It’s the little cry he gives when I pick him up: a cry that ought to be a scream, with those bruises, and the way his left arm is hanging—but he hasn’t even got the strength to scream. I cannot even tell when I’m hurting him. I lift him, and look into his eyes. What I see there I have never seen before.
And I go completely insane.
Somewhere far away, the woman is tugging at me, shrieking something at me. The man is on the floor, not moving, his face bloody. Not bloody enough. I can fix that. I start toward him, but she keeps getting in my way, she keeps making that sound. What has she got to make noise about? Her arm’s not broken, her body isn’t one big bruise—she doesn’t have those marks that had better not be cigarette burns. Pulling on the arm holding the baby, she will make me drop him. No, now she has stopped, now she is down there, quiet, like the man. Both in the red. Wet red. Good.
Still noise, so much noise. People shouting—the apartment is full of people, when did that happen? Police, lots of police—and one of them that one. He stares at me. Says, under all the racket, “What are you doing here? Who are you?”
“I am no one,” I say. I hand the baby to him. He looks down at it, and his young face goes a terrible color. Before he can raise his head again, the darkness …
… but no. Different this time. I am back almost immediately, ordinary night, and I am on the street, outside an apartment house I have never seen, where two police cars stand blinking redly at the curb. It is a warm night, but I’m shaking, and cannot stop. Something on my face, I brush at it, impatient. I have been … crying.
No purpose here: I know this. I walk away down the street. Keep walking, maybe that will help. For the moment, no place I should be, no helpless, desperate appeal closing on me. No one to save, only escape, evasion. A little time to wonder … to ask myself questions—did I kill those two? I was trying, I really wanted to kill them.
Blood crusting on the knuckles of both hands—my blood as well as theirs. My back pains me where the man hit me with some sort of kitchen object before I threw him through the door. I never have time to notice or remember pain; this is new. Yet nothing tonight hurt me as much as the look in the eyes of that urine-soaked child with his little arm dangling so … that was when I started crying and trying to kill, not merely protect. I can cry, then; there’s something else I know.
Perhaps learning to think was not a good idea. My head is crowded now, heaving and churning with faces, voices, moments … the old man hammering an older one with a heavy paint can, swinging it by the handle … the wild-eyed homeless man ringed by jeering boys, who finally catches hold of the one constantly darting in to steal his possessions out of his shopping cart, and has him down, hands around his throat, as the others swarm over him … the man with the tire iron, and the bleeding, half-naked woman who attacked me so furiously when I was taking it away from him …
But even so, even so, I can feel it coming closer, a fleeting space between strangers, between rescues, when something becomes almost clear, like the instant before dawn: the rush of paling sky, the first lights going on in windows, the earliest sounds of birds waking on rooftops. While in it I sense that there is a source of me, a point to me; a place, and a memory—and a name—and even my own dawn, where I belong …
wake not on the street but in a strange room, where I can see the sky—soft with early morning light, incomplete, the world heavy still with sleep—through tall narrow windows.
There are eight beds in this room, with bodies rounding the blankets in three of them, but no sound, except for the soft buzz and wheeze of machinery. A hospital. The woman in the nearest bed lies on her back, but twisted toward the right; if the tube plugged into a hole in her throat and a monitor beyond were not preventing it, she would be curled up on her side. Her breath is short and soundless, and too fast, and she smells like mildew. She is a big woman, but lying so makes her look shrunken, and older than she probably is. The chart at the foot of the bed is labeled JANE DOE. I sit down in a chair close to her.
She is very ugly. Her arms are thick, heavy, with tiny hands, the fingers all more or less the same size; you can hardly tell the thumb from the rest. Her black hair is lank and tangled, and her face is so pale that the blotches and faded pockmarks stand out like whip scars. Something once broke her nose and the bones of her face, badly. They are not right and clearly never will be. But her expression is utterly peaceful, serenely empty.
I know her.
The red. In the red, moving. Wants it not to move. Sound hurts me.
I say it out loud: “I know you.” You moved in the red. He kicked you. Shiny. I took it away.
Why am I here?
Jane Doe does not answer me. I never expected that she would. But the young nurse does, a moment later, when she comes storming into the room, demanding to know who I am. I could tell her that I am constantly asking myself the same question, but instead I say that I am Jane Doe’s friend. She promptly reaches for the telephone, saying that “Jane Doe” is the name they use for people whose real name no one knows—as I obviously do not. I could tear the phone out of her hand, out of the wall, but instead I sit and wait. She turns away to speak into the phone for a few moments, looking more and more puzzled and annoyed; then hangs it up and turns back to glare at me.
“How the hell did you get in here? Security says no one looking like you has been through at all.” She is black, tall and slender, with a small, delicate head, a naturally somber face. Quite pretty, but the confusion is making her really angry.
I say, “There was no one at the door. I just walked in.”
“Somebody dies for this,” she mumbles. She looks at her watch, makes a note on a pad of paper. “Oh, heads will roll, I swear.” Calming herself: “Go away, please, or I’ll have to have Security up. You don’t belong here.”
I look back at Jane Doe. “What is the matter with her?”
The nurse shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
I stand up. I say, “Tell me.”
The nurse looks at me for a long moment. I wonder what she sees. “I do that, you’ll leave without making any trouble?”
“Yes.”
“She was mugged. Ten, eleven months ago. Attacked on the street and beaten really badly—she almost died. They never caught the guy who did it. When she fell, she must have hit her head against something, a building. There was brain damage, bleeding. She’s been in a vegetative state ever since.” She gestures around her at the other silent beds. “Like the others here.”
“And you don’t know who she is.”
“Nobody does. Do you? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Oh yes. Yes.
“Will she always be like this?”
The nurse—the name on her blue and white breast pin says FELICIA—frowns and backs slowly toward the door. “On second thought, maybe you better stay right there. I’m going to go get someone who can answer your questions.”
She will come back with guards.
I sit down. I stare down into the big, blind, ugly face from my very first memory, trying to understand why the darkness brought me here. I watch the blinking monitors and wonder about so many things I do not even have thoughts for, let alone words. But it is more than I can grasp, and I have understood nothing when once more I lose the world.
Her name! Her name is …
another strange, dim street, and I am carrying a weeping, forlornly struggling girl out of a storefront that advertises ASIAN MAS AGE in its grimy window. She appears to be thirteen or fourteen years old. I cannot understand what she is saying to me.
But she is looking past me, over my shoulder; and when I turn, I see the group massing behind me. A hard-faced middle-aged couple, two younger men—squat, but burly in a top-heavy way—and a boy likely not very much older than the girl in my arms. He is the one holding the broken bottle.
I set the girl down on her feet, still holding her by the shoulders. She has a round, sweet face, but her eyes are mad with terror. I point at the sidewalk and say loudly, “Stay here!” several times, until it seems to get through, and she nods meekly. I cannot begin to guess how many times she must have made just that same gesture of bewildered submission in the face of power. I try to pat her shoulder, but she cringes away from me. I let her go, and turn back to face my new batch of enemies.
They are all shouting furious threats at me, but the boy seems to be the only one who speaks English. He eases toward me, waving the half bottle as menacingly as he can, saying, “You give her, get away. My sister.”
“She is no more your sister than I am,” I answer him. “She is a child, and I am taking her out of here.” Neighbors, fellow entrepreneurs, and curious nightwalkers are already gathering around the scene, silent, unfriendly. I say, “Tell the rest of them if they get in my way, that bottle goes up your nose, for a start, and I will beat those two fat boys to death with you. Tell them I am in a very bad mood.”
In truth, I am anxious for the police to show up before things get worse than they are. My mood is actually a kind of detached anger, nothing like the madness that took me over so completely when I saw that baby’s broken arm. Something changed then, surely. Even if it is what I am for—all I am for—I have no desire to fight anyone just at the moment. I want to go somewhere by myself and think. I want to go back to the hospital, and sit by Jane Doe’s bed, and look at her, and think.
But the two burly men are moving slowly out to left and right, trying to flank me, and that stupid boy is getting closer, in little dancy jump-steps. The girl is standing where I left her, wide-eyed, a finger in her mouth. There is a woman just behind her, middle-aged, with a heavy face and kind eyes. I ask her with my own eyes to keep the girl safe while I deal with her former employers, and she nods slightly.
The boy, seeing my attention apparently distracted, chooses this moment to lunge, his arm fully extended, his notion of a war cry carrying and echoing off the low storefronts. I spin, trip him up—the half bottle crashes in the gutter—and hurl him by his shirtfront into the path of the bravo on my left. They go down together, and I turn on the other one, catching him under the nose with the heel of my right hand, between belly and breath with the balled left. He clutches hard at me as he falls, but he does fall.
There are women spilling out of the massage parlor now, all very young, all wearing cut-off shorts and T-shirts that show their flat, childish stomachs. Most simply stare; a few run back into the storefront; two or three slip away down a half-hidden alley. The boy struggles to his feet and here he comes again, jabbing the air with a single jagged splinter of the broken bottle, cutting his own hand where he holds it. I am trying not to hurt him more than necessary, but he is not making it easy. I kick the glass shard out of his grasp, so he won’t fall on it when I side-kick his feet out from under him on my way toward the older couple. They back away fast—maybe from me, more likely from the lights and sirens coming up the street. I back off myself, and sigh with relief.
The girl is still where I left her, with the older woman’s hand resting lightly on her trembling shoulder. I catch the woman’s eye, nod my thanks, gesture toward the patrol car, and start to drift slowly away from there, eyes lowered.
One of the two policemen, Asian himself, is interrogating the massage parlor owners in their own language. But the other, much younger, sees me … looks past me … then looks again and heads straight for me. Through the shouting and the street noise, I hear his voice. “You! You hold it right there!”
I could still follow the escaping girls down the alley, but I stand where I am. He plants himself a foot in front of me, forefinger aimed at my chest. Surprisingly, he is smiling, but it is a tense, determined smile, not at all pleasant. He says, “We’re going to stop meeting like this, right now. Who the hell are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, right. And I’ll bet you aren’t carrying any ID, either.” He is too agitated to wait for me to answer. He charges on: “Goddammit, first I see you at that mall shooting, but you just disappear on me, I don’t know how. Then it was that crazy woman dropping her kids into the river—you dived in, went after them like some TV superhero—”
I interrupt him to ask, “The girl, the older one. Is she … will she be all right?”
His face changes; he stops pointing at me. He says nothing for a while, and his voice is lower when he speaks again. “We tried everything. If you’d bothered to stick around, you’d have known. But no—it’s another disappearing act, like a damn special effect. The
n that couple with the baby, those two meth-heads.” It is a different smile this time. “Okay, they had it coming, but you’re coming downtown with us on that one, and lucky it’s not a murder charge. Both of them still in the hospital, you know that?”
I wonder whether they are in the same hospital as Jane Doe. I wonder where the baby is, and I am about to ask him, when he continues, “Now this. What, you think you’re Batman, the Lone Ranger, rousting massage parlors, beating the crap out of rapists? You’re really starting to leave a trail, lady, and we need to have a conversation. You can’t do this shit.”
He reaches for the handcuffs at his belt. My hands raise automatically and he steps back, reaching for his holstered gun instead. I begin to explain why I cannot let him arrest me …
but then it is bright afternoon, and I am standing on a street across from a schoolyard in time to see a boy push a smaller boy down hard and run off, laughing. The little one is whimpering dazedly over ripped new blue jeans or a scraped knee, and doesn’t see the car coming. Other children and passersby do, but they’re too far away, and their warning screams are drowned by the shriek of brakes. No one can possibly reach him in time.
But of course I am there. It is what I do, being there.
Not even a spare second to scoop him up—I crash into him from the side, and the two of us roll away into the gutter as the car slews by, skidding in a half circle, so that it comes to rest on the far side of the street, facing us. The boy ends up in my arms, his eyes wide and frantic, but not crying at all now, because he cannot get his breath. Children are running toward us, adults are coming out of the school; the driver is already down on his knees beside us, easily as hysterical as the boy. But it’s all right. It is over. I was there.
My left shoulder hurts where I hit the asphalt, and I have banged my head on something, maybe the curb. Like Jane Doe. I stand up carefully and, as always, ease myself slowly away from the rejoicing and the praise. The boy has started to cry fully now, which is a relief to me.
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