by Chase Novak
That moment of blindness. How she wishes it could have lasted longer. Not just a moment—an hour. Not just an hour—an eternity. For what she sees now is by far the most gruesome sight she has ever beheld, or even imagined. What she sees now makes death preferable to having to live with the memory of what is right before her eyes.
Michael doesn’t mean to be a part of it, but there is no escaping it. He doesn’t want to believe them, but he does.
The children are holding his hands; the children are frightened and they are running, and Michael is frightened and running too.
Why not go to the police? But what can the police do? Two ten-year-olds on one side, and a respected lawyer dripping money and prestige on the other? At the very most, the police will “look into it.” It could take days, weeks, months before the folder landed on the desk of someone who’d give it a second look. And meanwhile…
They are more than half a block in front of Alex, but Michael dares a glance over his shoulder, and just as he feared, Alex is gaining on them, running with his head down and his elbows close to his sides, his arms moving back and forth with the implacability of pistons. There is a mindless, tireless purity to his gait, and for a moment Michael is overcome by the certainty that he could run for all he is worth and run faster and farther than he has ever run before and it still would not be enough. His very humanity is laced through and through with discouragement and self-doubt and these things beat a path straight to the sad, defeated heart of surrender. A zebra on the veldt will run forever, the beating of its hooves unimpeded by pessimism, its breaths uninterrupted by terror—indeed, the closer the lion gets, the more the zebra becomes at one with the singular task of flight. Safety! Safety! Even with the lion’s jaws around its hindquarters, the zebra will continue trying to escape. But a human being? Shortness of breath, a fiery stitch in the side, the sudden insanity of thinking that perhaps if you stop and try to reason with your pursuer, you will be better off—all these things conspire against you, and Michael wonders for a moment: What chance do I have? And, even more subversively: This has nothing to do with me. And, even more subversively than that: This is hopeless.…
But at that moment, Adam tightens his grip on Michael’s hand, and Alice likewise squeezes his other hand, and with the childish, trusting touch of these twins, his fate is sealed. He cannot and he will not betray them. He will not tell them to listen to their father. He will not try to convince them that things are not as bad as they imagine them to be. He will not beguile them with fantasies of the all-powerful police coming to their aid. With the touch of their hands they have said something that is beyond I love you, beyond desire, beyond any emotion and any commitment Michael has ever known. They have said I trust you with my life, and the immensity of this lifts him, and makes him duty bound.
“Turn right on Madison,” he tells them. “And go—let’s go, let’s go.”
Adam shoots him a look of acknowledgment too deep and too enveloping to be called gratitude. It speaks of a connectedness beyond the human ledger of what is asked for and what is granted, a sense of oneness that would render “Thank you” an expression of mere politeness, not much less insipid than “Have a nice day.” Alice lifts Michael’s hand so that his knuckles lightly touch her cheek, and it is like a contract signed in ink. No: in flesh. Actually: in blood.
In the time it has taken for Michael to have these thoughts, Alex has closed the gap between him and the children, from about two hundred feet to something close to one hundred. It’s clear to Michael that if this is a contest of speed, he and the twins are going to lose.
“Our main hope is that he doesn’t want to make a scene,” Michael tells the twins. “He’ll stay close but I bet he’s afraid to make a grab.”
Berryman Prep’s narrow east–west street is jammed with traffic—a truck has stopped somewhere between Fifth and Madison, and the drivers in all the cars stuck behind it lean frantically on their horns, filling the street with miserable braying honks, as if a herd of elephants has been penned and fears a slaughter is on the way. On either side of this strip of prime real estate, jacquard curtains are discreetly tugged to one side and the windows of the twenty-million-dollar town houses fill with frowning faces.
As they near the corner of Madison, Michael risks pulling the children out into the street, between two yellow cabs that are stuck in traffic, and once the three of them are on the other side of the street, he races west with them, toward Fifth Avenue. His instinct tells him that they will have more of a chance to elude Twisden if they can somehow get to Central Park. But Twisden is not so easily thrown off the trail. He doesn’t bother to cross the street then himself, but he keeps pace with them and is just about to cross to their side of the street when suddenly the traffic unclogs and Alex must stop for a few moments and wait for an opening.
Michael senses an opportunity for safety: a FreshDirect delivery truck, filled with groceries for the housebound and the wealthy, slows down and comes to a stop directly to the left of where he and the twins are on the sidewalk, momentarily blocking them from view.
At that same moment, they hear a rolling rumbling sound behind them, and in virtual unison, the three of them turn to see a pack of young teenagers riding skateboards along the sidewalk, crouched on the decks of their boards and seeming to give no thought to the pedestrians who scramble to get out of their way.
“It’s Rodolfo,” Alice says with a shiver of excitement.
“Rodolfo?” Michael asks.
“He’s real name’s Richard, but everyone calls him Rodolfo,” Alice says. Her voice is bright with the pride a child feels when she has the answer. “I met him in the park.”
“Hey, man,” Rodolfo says as he rolls up next to Adam and puts his arm around him, almost knocking him over.
The driver of the FreshDirect truck lights a cigarette and rolls down the window to let the smoke out.
Rodolfo and his friends surround them—a couple are familiar to Alice, the others are not. It’s not obvious who is a boy and who is a girl; it seems really not to matter very much. There is something similar about all of them—it is as if there is more energy going through them than their bodies can contain. Impulse, appetite, sex drive, willfulness all seem to wrestle and writhe within each of them, like monkeys in a laundry bag. One of the skaters continually shakes his head, like a swimmer trying to dislodge water from his ear canal, though maybe this is a girl. Another—stovepipe thin, ponytailed, reeking of smoke and burned coffee—stomps on the stern of his/her skateboard, causing the bow of the deck to pop up like a jack-in-the-box. Yet in the chaos there seems to be some kind of design. They form a ring around Michael and the twins, preventing them from moving, but also obscuring them from view.
“Follow me,” Rodolfo says. He sniffs, snorts, clears his throat, and rolls his shoulders.
“Who the hell are you?” Michael asks.
“My house is right over here.”
“Have you been following us?” Alice asks.
“We saw you,” Rodolfo says. “Come on, no time to talk.”
He leads them to a four-story town house made of rust-red brick with white wooden trim around the windows, a house that someone has recently bought and that is now being gutted. Two dark green metal dumpsters are curbside, filled with rubble. A plywood ramp has been placed over the front steps, allowing the work crew to wheel sand and bricks out as the inside of this stately old house is demolished.
“Where’s your family?” Alice asks him.
“Who the fuck knows?” Rodolfo says. He puts his arm around Alice, pulls her close to him, sniffs the top of her head.
“Don’t,” she says, pushing him away.
“Maybe later,” he says.
Rodolfo directs Michael and the twins to follow him up the ramp. Michael looks over his shoulder, fervently hoping that the FreshDirect truck is still blocking Twisden’s view. But the truck is finally moving again—though now Twisden is surrounded by Rodolfo’s friends, who are doing whatever the
y can to block his view.
The locks to the enormous carved wooden door to the entrance have been cored out and filled with pinkish putty, and now the door is secured by a single padlock. But the rivets that attach the plate to the door have been loosened, and when Rodolfo hits his shoulder against the door, it opens immediately.
“He’ll find us!” Adam cries as Rodolfo pulls them into the house.
As dank and chilly as it is outside, it is even more bone-chilling inside this house. The deep, earthy smells of cement, sand, plaster, mud mingle with the sharper, somehow more alarming smell of sawed and splintered wood, of burned-out electric wires, and also of the frantic human smell of a desperate man who comes at night to plunder the copper wires and pipes and whatever little scraps he can find for resale. Even now, the twins’ nostrils quiver and dilate at the sour-sweet aroma of sweat extruded through the soft mesh of skin already permeated by cheap brandy and Risperdal.
Broken bars of weak gray light come through the hastily nailed boards over the windows. The entrance foyer reminds the twins of their own house, some twenty blocks south. Though they are standing on cardboard that bears the muddy prints of many, many waffle-soled work boots, they imagine that beneath it are the honey-hued oak parquet floors of home, perhaps with the same starburst inlays. Despite everything, and against all logic and all instinct toward self-preservation, Adam and Alice long for home with the openhearted helplessness of children. Like all young mammals, they are genetically encoded to trust their parents and believe that the people who brought them to life are their havens in a heartless world. It is in their brains, it is in the wash of their spinal fluid, it is their most basic and necessary engineering to believe that their mother and father are here to protect them, and they hold on to this instinct no matter how compelling the evidence to the contrary—and even then, even after they let go of the illusion and begin to run for their own lives, doubt shadows their every move, as they are reacting to a reality that is in essence inconceivable, a truth that continually feels like a lie manufactured by their own failings or by the misfirings of their own feverish minds.
“Ever wish you were adopted?” Rodolfo asks Adam.
“No.”
Rodolfo’s grin is gummy, bordering on the equine. “My peeps had to sell this place. The new owners hired a bunch of guys to come do the reno, and they found a lot of shit that was really fucking weird. Now the new owners are in court trying to get their money back—but guess what? That money is gone, and so are Mr. and Mrs. Pomerantz.” Rodolfo waves his fingers as if saying good-bye to the picture of his parents that floats in his mind.
“We’ll hang here until it’s safe,” Michael whispers.
“Maybe,” Adam says. At first Michael wonders if Adam is questioning his plan, but a moment later he realizes that maybe means that safety seems like a total long shot.
“I’ll show you around my lovely home,” Rodolfo says with a host’s sweep of the arm. He guides them deeper into the house, into a room that was perhaps the parlor but has been so thoroughly taken apart that all that exists of the walls are unpainted wooden slats holding in fiberglass insulation. The ceiling has been completely removed, offering up the underside of the second floor, wide oak planks with the sullen silver tips of two-inch flooring nails poking through them.
“This was a very sad room,” Rodolfo says.
“Why sad?” Alice asks.
“I found my dog Casper in this room, afterward.” He says it in an exaggeratedly bright tone and rubs his hands together like a magician preparing to pull a coin out of someone’s ear. “In fact, every room in this house has an awful memory. Upstairs was where I once walked in on my parents having sex, and my father threw me down the stairs, and then my mother came down and I thought she was going to help me, but she was just as bad. And in the bathroom is where I found our cat, Shirley MacLaine.” Rodolfo notices an old mahogany telephone table missing one of its legs leaning against what is left of the wall. He picks it up as if it weighs almost nothing, lifts it over his head, and sends it flying toward the lath work, where it hits with a ferocious crack.
The children cringe. Michael looks around, trying quickly to see if there are other ways into this place and other ways out. Michael checks his watch. It’s 11:30. Normally, he has a nearly unerring sense of time—as a teacher, he can tell without glancing up at the clock how close he is to the end of the period, and at home he knows without the use of a timer when to scoop out the eggs bobbing and clicking in the bubbling water so they will be perfectly soft-boiled. But now he is so far off course it’s as if he has entered a new dimension, one where E=mc quadrupled. How is he standing in a squat with a bunch of feral teenagers as they spin tales of their abuse? Why isn’t he at work? Where is Xavier? His main thought is that he and the twins need to stay in this house at least fifteen minutes before venturing into the street again. That’s all he can say for now. That’s what a lifetime gathering wisdom and experience has added up to. Fifteen minutes parked right here.
From outside: the whoop of a fire truck’s siren, its urgencies echoing back and forth off the facades of the houses. And then: the blare of the truck’s horn, as powerful as the warning blast from an onrushing train. What clearer illustration of a world gone wrong than a fire truck stuck behind drivers hunting for parking spaces while somewhere a building is engulfed in flames?
The sound is unsettling to Michael but unbearable to the twins and Rodolfo, who cover their ears against the noise, screw their eyes shut, hunch their shoulders, grimace, as if in pain.
When the fire truck is finally able to get through, the noise subsides and the kids uncover their ears, breathe sighs of relief.
“Don’t worry about your father,” Rodolfo says.
“He’s really strong,” Adam says.
“And fast,” says Alice.
“This is insane,” says Michael.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Adam says.
“We didn’t,” Alice adds. “No way. Nothing big. It’s not…”
“It’s not fair,” says Adam.
“It’s not,” says Alice. “He’s crazy. They both are.”
“No one’s going to kill you,” Michael says. “Or hurt you.” But even to himself, his words and the voice with which he delivers them seem weak and unconvincing.
“There’s something wrong with them,” Adam says. “Really really wrong.”
“They used to be nice,” Alice says.
“Sometimes they still are,” Adam says. He is suddenly worried that they have gone too far in their criticisms and that somehow, through some dark magic, their words are going to make themselves known to their parents.
“Some of the parents try not to hurt,” Rodolfo says, nodding sagely. He speaks to the twins as if he were many years their senior.
“I think that’s why they lock us up,” says Alice.
“Wait,” Michael asks. “Lock you up where?”
Adam and Alice fall silent. They have been taught all their lives to keep family secrets, and even now, when they are on the run, the fear of betraying their parents is immense and palpable.
“Guys,” Michael says, hoping for many, many reasons that the situation he finds himself in is not as abnormal as it seems, “come on. Kids have issues with their parents. I had issues with mine—big ones.”
“We don’t have issues,” Adam says.
“We don’t even know what issues are,” adds Alice.
Michael hears something, a throaty flutter, a sudden warning displacement of the air—and the twins hear it too. They all three of them look up toward the sound in the back of the house, in a room in which half the floor has been taken out, revealing the hundred-and-twenty-year-old joists onto which the planks had once been nailed. On the part of the floor that is still intact, there is a heap of tarps and drop cloths, paint and plaster splattered. For a moment, it seems as if something is stirring beneath the pile.…
And there, above, is a family of pigeons, two large gra
y-and-pink adults with feathers puffed up against the cold, and two pigeon chicks, downy and pale gray, looking not unlike ducklings. One of the adult pigeons is hovering over one of the chicks and regurgitating what looks like spoiled cottage cheese into its wide-open beak.
“Yo,” says Rodolfo, “I never fucking saw a baby pigeon.” He licks his lips, moves forward a bit.
“The parents hide them until they are big,” Adam says. “That stuff the big one is throwing up into the baby is called pigeon milk; it makes them grow real fast.”
“Is that the mother feeding them?” Rodolfo asks.
“The mother and the father both do,” Adam says.
“Amazing,” Michael says. “It’s like they’re giving their babies their own bodies to help them grow.”
“At our house it’s sort of different,” Alice says.
When Cynthia recovers (though not really: she will never recover) from the sight of Xavier—his left arm all but missing, only one bone and some rags of flesh still attached to him, like red streamers on a child’s handlebar grips, and strips of the human meat of him peeled away from his left side—she tries to figure out a way of releasing him from the blood-and-waste spattered cage in which he is kept; failing that, she stumbles up the steps, dialing and redialing 911 on her smartphone, which has been struck dumb by the depth and soundproofing of the cellar, until she is standing in the front hall talking to a dispatcher, a woman with a Jamaican accent who instantly diagnoses the combination of hysteria and catatonia in Cynthia’s voice and speaks to her in comforting but efficient tones, assuring her that an ambulance will be there within minutes, and when Cynthia, almost weeping now, says that perhaps the police need to come as well, the dispatcher assures her that will happen too. She askes Cynthia, “You going to hang in there for me, aren’t you?,” the simple humanity of which so touches Cynthia that she begins to sob.
The EMT workers and the police arrive at the same time. Cynthia directs them all to the cellar, and they find Xavier unconscious in his cage. Cynthia, who has not followed them down but who sits on a graceful, fragile little cherrywood chair pressed against the wall a few feet from the door to the cellar, her eyes shut, her head dangling, and her stomach churning a thick batter of bile, hears the cops and the EMT workers talking, hears them breaking open the cage, hears one of them say, “On three!,” and then hears more talk, murmurs both urgent and indistinct.
