by Chase Novak
Adam doesn’t answer immediately, but then he shakes his head. “No. I fell.”
“Where’s your sister anyhow? Where’s Alice?”
Adam tentatively reaches toward the bed and touches it, first with just his fingertips, and then with his entire hand. Before Michael can ask him what he’s doing, the boy collapses facedown onto the bed, draws his knees up to his chest, and tucks one hand under his head.
“Adam?” Michael stands over the boy, who seems to have fallen into a deep sleep. A stroke, a poison dart, death itself could not have extinguished consciousness so quickly and so totally. Gently, Michael shakes the boy’s shoulder. “Adam? Come on, son, you can’t…” He shakes his shoulder again, this time a little more forcefully. A low, vibrating sound comes out of the boy, something between a moan and a growl, and the sound of it touches a primal nerve in Michael, chilling his blood, raising the hairs on his arm, and causing him to hold his breath as he steps backward.
With the bed occupied and only one sofa in the apartment, that night Xavier heads uptown to Inwood to sleep at his sister’s apartment. Shortly after moving from Havana to New York, she and her husband separated—he has moved to New Haven to work as a security guard at Yale, and though he is there with the good excuse of taking a much-needed job, it is an unspoken truth between them that Raul has fallen in love with a woman in Bridgeport with whom he spends every spare moment—and now the long New York nights are particularly lonely for Rosalie.
“Bring me a pack of Winston cigarettes,” Rosalie says. “And the sugar and I have coffee for morning.” Her English is still something of an adventure, but she refuses to speak Spanish with her brother, or with anyone else. It might have been part of what drove Raul away, thinks Xavier. Plus her bossy manner. However, he feels bad for having anything but gratitude for her generosity; who else in this city could he call with the announcement that he was on his way over for the rest of the night? New York is a place of great friendliness, but limited hospitality.
He is half a block from his apartment house now. The night is cold and wet. Tires from the passing cars, taxis for the most part, whisper and hiss over the wet pavement; the streetlamps reflect on the windshields, which are dotted with rain. In Havana, drivers use their windshield wipers as little as possible, but here they wave frantically back and forth even in a drizzle.
His plan is to walk to Twenty-Third and Park Avenue South and catch the East Side train to Grand Central Station, where he will connect with the shuttle that will bring him to Times Square, where he can board the A train to his sister’s neighborhood. As Xavier walks west on Twenty-First Street, he notices that each step he takes is mirrored by the step being taken by someone across the street. When Xavier speeds up, the man across the street quickens his pace too, and when Xavier deliberately slows down, the man across the street slows down as well. He seems to dodge the circles of light dropped by the streetlamps, and the night is too thick to see anything but his shape. Xavier has a vague idea that this same fellow was posted across the street from the apartment and had begun shadowing Xavier from there, but Xavier was engrossed in his phone call and wasn’t paying close attention.
Usually there are plenty of people out on the street, even on this basically residential block, but the bad weather has limited the population to just the two of them. Xavier is in terrific shape and he knows how to handle himself in a fight, but he feels a rush of dread. Should he stop in his tracks, at which point the man across the street can either continue on his way or state his business? But no: here in New York it is not always a matter of strength and courage or even martial art; here, the shitty people carry weapons, often guns.
Is it someone who wants to rob him? All he has in his wallet is about thirty dollars. He would hate to lose even that small amount of money. Rosalie wants her Winstons and her sugar…
Xavier stops, and sure enough the man stops too. Xavier turns to look at him directly, but the man pivots away, glances up, as if there is something in a lit window up high that has captured his attention. Xavier could cross the street, though he is not sure what he will do once he is there. As he prepares to step off the curb, a taxi approaches, its plastic tiara lit, signaling that it’s ready to accept the next fare. He raises one finger. Like most cabbies in New York, the driver has perfected braking so that the handle of the rear door is directly in front of the passenger.
The cabbie is a Sikh. The earpiece of his cell phone snakes under his turban. “Yes? Where can we go?” he asks. Xavier is about to say he wants to be taken to Twenty-Third and Eighth, where he can board the A train, but before he can get the words out he sees the man who has been tracking him suddenly dart into the street.
“Go!” Xavier shouts to the driver, who is fiddling with his earpiece with one hand and tripping the meter with the other. Yet the urgency in Xavier’s voice is not lost on the driver, and he puts the cab into gear just as the man rushes toward the door and attempts to open it. Instinctively, Xavier lifts his arm to shield himself, as if this man were a landslide of rocks and mud about to come crashing down on him. The man slams his gloved hand against the window, almost popping it loose from its casing, and roars with anger, frustration. He has a large head, coarse features, bushy hair.
The taxi heads west and Xavier looks out the rear window, his heart twisting and clawing within its box of bones. The man is running after them. His feet seem barely to touch the ground.
“Oh, this is a crazy city in a crazy country,” the driver says. He places his hand on top of his turban as if it might blast off his head.
“Just go,” Xavier says. “Make the light.”
“The light is mine for making.”
As the taxi picks up speed, the man stands in its wake, in the middle of the street. Headlights are coming up behind him, and for a moment Xavier thinks he is going to witness this man being plowed beneath the wheels of oncoming traffic. But at the last moment he steps out of the way, and disappears into the darkness.
Xavier allows himself to relax. He leans back, closes his eyes for a moment, but as he does, he feels the taxi slowing. They have not made the light after all. It shines deeply red, a bullet hole in the darkness. Xavier again turns in his seat to look out the rear window of the taxi, just as the door to the cab’s backseat is yanked open.
It all happens so quickly, the driver barely has time to react. Xavier feels the man’s powerful hands grabbing at his jacket, smells the man’s tangy, meaty breath as he pulls him close. As if Xavier is trapped in a horrible dream, he is lifted from the seat and pulled from the taxi. Through the cardio chaos of blood pounding in his ears and the sound of his own terrified shouts, he can barely hear the cabbie’s cries of alarm. He feels his attacker’s hand on his chin. One finger, sharply nailed, is shoved in his nostril, another pokes at the edge of his eyes. Suddenly, consciousness disappears, as if his brain were an electrical appliance and someone just kicked the plug out of its socket.
For years, Adam has wondered what the night was like outside the confines of his locked room. He has heard so many times from his father about the things that can befall a child at night, and reason has been heaped upon reason to justify Adam’s and Alice’s imprisonment. He has heard about muggers and slashers and kidnappers. He has been taught to fear those in the city who are less well-off than he and his family, those huddled masses who have had enough of huddling and might at any moment come sweeping through the unguarded gates of Manhattan’s loveliest quarters with vengeance in their hearts and murder in their eyes. But as much as he has been taught to dread the night and all of its countless dangers, what Adam has truly come to dread is the sullen click of the lock after his door is closed, that final metallic clunk that says: You must stay here.
As he grew older, Adam came to long for freedom from that locked room—the bed, the desk, the carpet, the steel-gated window—with a kind of blind, consuming passion. And when he began to realize that, rather than keeping them safe, his parents were keeping him and his sister in the place where th
ey were perhaps less safe than anywhere else on earth, the desire to escape became a kind of mania. Yet now that he is finally out in the night, out in the great wide world, finally free, he is puzzled and saddened to realize that his heart is anything but filled with joy. Is he more afraid here in this strange apartment, this strange, chilly room, than he was locked in his own bedroom? Perhaps not. But here the fear is less familiar, and so it is somehow more painful and destabilizing to feel it.
Awake again, he spreads his arms to see if he can reach from one side of Mr. Medoff’s bed to the other. He stares up at the ceiling. He looks at the dull, somehow saddening little lightbulb in the ceiling, hiding behind a milky glass fixture. The fixture itself holds a dozen desiccated flies in its concavity. He hears Michael’s footsteps in the next room. How strange it must be to live in such a small place, where people are never really apart. He hears Michael clear his throat. It’s almost as if the teacher is right here in this room, standing next to him. Next, Adam hears the electronic chirp of the keypad on a telephone being pressed.
I want to live, Adam thinks. A simple enough thought, but words he has never formed in his mind before, and they seem to have a magical power, a kind of abracadabra spell-casting power that opens the floodgates and releases an inner sea of emotion. A moment later Adam’s face is scalding as he is overcome with his own instinctive drive to survive.
As he has done countless nights before, he calms himself by closing his eyes and counting his breaths. As he quiets his mind, his body has a chance to assert itself and clamor for its own need for sleep. He falls into a sudden slumber as if walking off the edge of a cliff.
He dreams of his father. Eating meat that swims in a pool of its own… Well, Alex calls it gravy, but Adam would have to say it’s blood.
How much time passes? A minute? Five? Adam awakens to the sound of his cell phone chiming in his jeans, which are draped over the footboard of his teacher’s bed. Oh please, be Alice. He looks at the screen. Yes!
She has sent him a text message: Ware r u? In the darkness—the older he gets, the keener his eyes—he texts back @ m medoff 400 e 21 r u ok?? He clutches the phone and stares at the little screen as it slowly goes dark. Finally, Alice answers back: go 2 parc. Alex’s response is instant. What park?? He shakes his phone as if to hurry his sister’s response, but again the screen goes dark, and this time it stays that way.
Alex Twisden forces himself to walk casually, Xavier’s unconscious body slung over his back. Alex wants to look to the world like a man carrying his drunken pal home after a night of killer martinis, and maintaining a steady pace and a calm expression are both key to the masquerade. He walks north on Madison Avenue, along a route with few restaurants and clubs and practically nobody on the street. When he does pass someone—say, a short, spiky-haired woman walking a rather delicious-looking dachshund, or a couple of Korean businessmen in animated conversation—he purses his lips and nods brusquely, which has become the universal sign for I see you and I see that you belong here and I do too.
Alex is counting on the likelihood that the cabdriver will not want to sacrifice the rest of his shift by reporting the assault to the cops and will instead continue to cruise the streets of New York, trying to make a living.
When another taxi comes into view, Alex lifts his hand to hail it.
At that same moment, Xavier starts to regain consciousness. It is like slowly rising from the deepest part of the sea, a sea filled not with water but with soaked cloths, mud, faces.… He opens his eyes, sees the dim upside-down world. This much he knows: someone is holding him. He squirms, hoping to get away, as his wallet falls from the inside pocket of his leather jacket to the curb a hundred thousand miles below.
And Alex, standing between the curb and a streetlight and feeling the shift in his human cargo, says in the most comforting tone he can summon, “Don’t worry, pal, I’m taking you home.” The cab stops in front of them.
“I was attacked. Who are you?”
“A friend. Just tell me your address.”
Xavier tells Alex his address, and when asked for it he also supplies the apartment number. Reaching for the taxi door, Alex turns nimbly so that Xavier’s head knocks with considerable force against the streetlight’s thick metal stem, plunging him back into unconsciousness—perhaps even killing him, for all Alex can tell.
“Whoa,” the driver says, seeing the state of Alex’s companion. The cabbie is young, with dragons and Chinese characters tattooed on his arms and neck. “You going to a hospital?”
“No, we’re fine,” Alex says good-naturedly. “Some people shouldn’t drink.”
“Tell me about it,” the driver says, starting the meter. “Where to?”
Alice has never been out on her own after dark. In fact, she has barely been anywhere by herself in the daylight hours. But tonight she has run through the streets of the Upper East Side, past curious doormen who follow her with their eyes, past restaurants with limousines black as hearses idling in front of them, past jewelry stores and nail salons closed, locked, and gated for the night. Every step of the way she senses someone is close behind her, either gaining on her or, momentarily, falling back, but she does not dare turn around. She feels someone pounding down the pavement, hands outstretched, trying to grab her and take her back to the house, which would be more than she could bear. It would be the end of her.
She is in jeans; Nikes; a black ski parka; a Peruvian wool cap, red, orange, and blue. Her backpack, too full to properly close, has been hastily stuffed with clothes, schoolwork, a package of lunch meat, and the phone she uses to text her brother. When she comes to a sudden stop, her phone seems to fly out of her backpack. It hits the sidewalk with a clattering noise and spins crazily onto the street, where it is promptly crushed beneath the wheels of a FreshDirect truck, delivering groceries even at this late hour. Next comes a taxi, then a Con Ed van, then another taxi, then yet another taxi, and all of them inflict their damage on the phone, though surely it was dead at the initial blow.
Now without her phone, she feels as if Adam has vanished. She has only one clear thought: The park! She is not even sure why Central Park seems to her the only safe place in the city right now, but she yearns for the fragrant darkness of those dormant acres, the trees, the shadows, the tunnels and stones, the countless secret places.
She knows she is not alone. She can feel herself being watched. She looks behind her. Smoke pours out of a Con Ed construction site in the center of the street, lit by a large yellow light that pulsates like a frightened heart. Alice’s skin feels horribly alive. Her mind races. Her thoughts are no more distinguishable to her than snowflakes in a blizzard. She sees a figure emerging from the smoke. Run! she tells herself, but her legs are heavy and when she can finally get them to move she immediately stumbles.
But it’s not her mother. It’s a homeless man pushing a shopping cart that overflows with cans and bottles. His cargo’s rattle echoes in the night.
She enters the park at Sixty-Fifth Street, hopping over the little stone wall and traipsing through the frosted foliage. She feels a powerful urge to relieve herself, but there is no way she can do it, no way, no way, no way.
There is a playground nearby for little kids. No way she is going to pee in a playground. Alice remembers coming here with Adam when they were small, always with either their mother or their father, and with a nanny in tow. She remembers them all, the parade of appearing and disappearing nannies, but remembers them dimly, like songs heard just once or twice, a long time ago. There was Pilar, Sonia, Mercedes, Erin. There was Mrs. Calhoun, Susana, Susan, Sue, and Sue Ellen, and then there was Cher, with her deep tan and cobalt-blue eyes the color of airport landing lights, who was full of hilarity one moment and dumbstruck with private unhappiness the next, and who turned out to be a man—Adam saw him taking a leak at Ray’s Famous Pizza.
With each nanny there was a sudden infusion of fun, of brightness, gaiety, but each one’s term was fleeting. Some of them managed quick, apolog
etic good-byes to the twins, others simply vanished, and now, standing at the wrought-iron gate to the playground and watching the empty swings moving in the night wind, Alice has a distinct, piercing memory of sunlight through the latticework of her eyelashes as one of the nannies—Mercedes?—pushed her between her shoulder blades to make Alice swing in the bucket seat next to Adam—“We’re flying, we’re flying,” he said—while she whispered anxiously to her friend, another nanny, who was standing next to her, her own charge asleep in a stroller. “I’m so scared,” Mercedes had said. “I see what they eat.”
A silent squad car, its emergency lights flashing, races from east to west through the park, and Alice, too, moves west, zigging and zagging, feeling the cold and the damp seeping through her sneakers. Soon she is on a long, broad paved walkway with benches on either side. The spires of the immense apartment houses of Central Park West momentarily come into view, their windows dim and gauzy.
The next thing she knows, she is crouched behind a large bush, her pants down, squatting, breathing a long sigh of relief as the pee spatters onto the frozen leaves, and a thick soupy smell of her own urine rises in a cloud of steam. She can’t believe she is doing this. And yet she cannot stop. The relief of it is greater than the weirdness and greater, too, than the looming fear of being discovered. She stares straight ahead, emptying her mind along with her bladder, closing her eyes, allowing herself to relax in the familiar internal darkness that is her self, her essential, private self.
Yet this piece of internal real estate, which has forever been her refuge, is suddenly invaded by the leering, snarling figure of… her mother. Her mother! Her bright green eyes, too intense. The fresh spray of flowery perfume. The face of her wristwatch floating on a wave of amber hairs… The woman who all of biology and all of culture has urged Alice to trust. I see what they eat, the nanny hissed.
Alice opens her eyes, banishing the memory. But the relief of the cold darkness is immediately overturned by the sound of something breathing rapidly behind her. Gasping, she pulls her pants back up, but in her haste she trips herself and falls to her knees. “Oh oh oh,” she whimpers. Where her pant leg has risen, there is an inch of bare flesh between her cuff and the top of her sock, and she feels something cold and alive touch her skin. With a cry, she turns to see what has touched her.
