Breed

by Chase Novak

  “I guess,” says Alice, though she knows better.

  Despite the search for the so-called pedophile and the two so-called abducted children, it looks not that much different from any other day at the Metropolitan when the class and Alice reach the first floor. There are police standing at the exits, but their expressions are mildly curious, and their posture is relaxed. And meanwhile, people are streaming in and out, alone and in pairs and in groups, tourists, art lovers, lonely people, young and old.

  The police at the door pay scarcely any attention as the sixth-graders and Alice stream past them and outside. She continues to count her breaths as she steps out into the cold gray afternoon.

  Michael is counting too: benches. Walking backward so he can see Adam or Alice approach. But where are they?

  He is at the limit of what he can endure. He has been in a constant state of anxiety since Adam appeared at his apartment. He has entered a world he has never imagined. The rug of reality has been yanked from under him by an unseen hand. He feels alone, abandoned, unequal to the task. And Xavier: Where in the fucking hell are you?

  At the fiftieth bench, he stops, sits, facing east. Before him is a statue of King Jagiello, the fifteenth-century unifier of Poland and Lithuania, the grand duke of Lithuania, vanquisher of the Teutonic aggressors at the Battle of Grunwald. The statue was brought to New York by the Poles for the 1939 World’s Fair, and while it was here, Poland fell to the German army, after which monuments celebrating the defeat of the Teutonic hordes were not welcome in Poland, and so the bronze statue stayed put, and it has been here ever since. The king’s armored horse looks rather demure, its head cocked to one side, its eyes startled and wide as it gazes down and off to one side, as if to avoid the sights of the slaughter sure to come. But Jagiello himself brims with military bluster, his crown firmly perched on a head of flowing hair, his expression stubborn and royally confident, his arms raised in a V, a long sword in each hand, the swords themselves crossed in an X, one tip pointing north and the other south.

  “May I trouble you for a light?” a voice says.

  Startled out of his reverie, Michael sits up straighter. Something tells him not to turn around. A thumping heartbeat later, Alex Twisden is sitting next to him. Twisden smells of earth and wind; his shoes are splattered with mud.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” Michael says in a quiet voice.

  “Why are you in my life?” Alex asks. He folds his arms over his chest, stretches out his legs. “Why do I even fucking know you?”

  A couple of nannies wheeling their well-swaddled charges walk by. It has gotten colder, and when the nannies open their mouths to talk, clouds of vapor come out and hang in the air like dialogue balloons in a comic strip. One of them glances at Alex and whispers something to her friend, who looks back over her shoulder at Twisden as the two women go on their way.

  “I’m going to call the police,” Michael says.

  “Good! The police are looking for you. The crazy fag who took two children away from their home.”

  “The children are terrified of you, Twisden. Terrified.”

  Alex lays his hand on Michael’s knee. Pats it. Squeezes it. Pats it again.

  “You’re a good person,” Twisden says. “I know this.”

  Michael doesn’t say anything. From a distance, he sees Adam, walking slowly, counting the benches.

  “I would like to know what my children have said about their parents.”

  “What are you worried about? What is the thing that you don’t want them to say?”

  “Don’t joust with me, Mr. Grade-School Teacher. You’re way above your pay grade. I do this for a living. Rule number one: you don’t ask a question unless you already know the answer.”

  “But I do,” Michael says. “I do know the answer. I know exactly what you want to keep secret.”

  Twisden laughs. Michael wonders if he is merely trying to conceal his feelings by pretending he finds all this terribly amusing, or if he is laughing over what is about to happen, which only Twisden himself can know.

  “You’re gay, aren’t you,” Twisden says, suddenly very serious.

  “Oh yes. Indeed. Extremely gay. Gay as the day is long. Über-gay, turbo-gay. Why? Are you having feelings?”

  “Look here, teacher boy. Your sexuality is of no interest to me. But like any parent, I am not going to sit idly by while some gay teacher seduces my son away from his family. You find him attractive. And by now maybe you’re finding the girl a little… shall we say: interesting.”

  “You’re insane.” Michael makes a move to stand. He knows Adam is getting closer and closer, and he not only wants to get away from Twisden but also is hoping, against all probability, that Twisden has not yet noticed his son slowly approaching.

  But Twisden is fast and he is strong. He clasps Michael’s shoulder and presses him down as if he is leaning on a plunger that will explode sticks of dynamite.

  “What’s your hurry? Do you think I don’t see my son making his way toward us? He’s my son. My son! There is nothing in the world I care about more. He’s mine. Not yours. Mine. Do you understand me? It’s just natural. You’ll see. One day you and Xavier might adopt a nice little Chinese baby, and you’ll be surprised how protective you’ll come to feel.”

  “How do you even know Xavier?”

  “Hmm,” Twisden says, tapping his forefinger against his chin. “That’s an excellent question. How do I know Xavier?”

  “Where is he, Twisden?” Michael attempts to rise again and this time manages to twist away from Alex’s grip. “You are going down, man.” Michael glances over his shoulder. Adam sees him and he also sees his father; he has stopped right where he is, eight benches away. About twenty benches away from Michael, Alice walks, her head down, pointing at each bench as she counts it off.

  From the opposite direction, he hears a shout. “Alex? Sweetheart?” It’s Leslie, walking quickly, her trench coat open and filled with the wind, puffed out like a sail, her hair blowing. She starts to run.

  Michael turns toward Alex and pulls his phone out of his back pocket, flips it open. “It’s over. You understand? Over.”

  Twisden slowly get up. He is three or four inches taller than Michael and he makes every inch of his advantage count—posture, proximity, a palpable willingness to do harm. He tries to snatch Michael’s phone away before he can dial 911 and hit the Send button, but Michael turns quickly so his back is to Twisden, which is a successful maneuver inasmuch as it protects his phone and the integrity of the call, but in every other way it is the worst thing he could have done.

  “Remember when I tossed you against the wall in Mr. Fleming’s office?” Twisden says. “Too bad there are no walls here.” And with a roar of fury Twisden grabs Michael from behind and lifts him high off the ground, holds him aloft.

  “Alex!” Leslie calls out, fearing the worst.

  “Dad!” Adam cries. “Let him alone.”

  Michael tries to twist free of the grip, but he is held as tightly as a fox in a trap, and a kind of calm begins to settle over him, a passivity perhaps, a recognition of how futile it is to resist. The tops of the trees seem abnormally close; their bare branches form ten thousand cracks in the low gray sky. Across the expanse of clouds, a jet, still in takeoff mode from Kennedy, disappears into the clouds, a needle in the haystack of eternity. Michael’s only hope is that someone else will intervene.

  “Stay back!” he shouts to Adam. “Just get out of here.”

  “Don’t talk to my kid,” Twisden all but growls. “He’s mine. Mine. Mine mine mine mine.”

  Over and over, louder and louder, Twisden repeats the word—mine, mine—until it becomes a chant, an exercise in self-hypnosis, a battle cry.

  Oh my God, Michael thinks. My life! Before he can further consider the onrushing darkness that will engulf him, he is tossed into the air by the astonishing force of Twisden’s thrust. For a moment, Michael thinks that he is going to fall quickly, and his first instinct is to cover
his face, protect his teeth, somehow dampen the thud. He hopes he will hit the grass and not the concrete pavement or one of the benches.

  But the odd thing is he is not falling at all, not yet. He is rising, his arms outstretched, his legs too. He turns slightly, sees the bystanders: a couple of skateboarders; a group of Asian tourists, their cameras dangling over their Burberry coats. A fleeting thought: Are these really going to be the last things I ever see?

  He reaches the apex of his arc; he can feel the end of his upward surge, a moment of calm while the force of the vile, violent energy that has thrust him upward surrenders its primacy to the omnipotent force of gravity, and Michael begins his inevitable descent. Instinctively, his hands reach out, clawing desperately, as if he were a trapeze artist trying to stop his fall, grasping for a suddenly vanished ring. And yet: his fall does not last more than another instant.

  It is fatally interrupted by King Jagiello’s raised swords. The bronze point of the south-pointing sword pierces Michael through the thigh of his right leg, and the point of the other sword plunges between his shoulder blades. Driven by his own weight, he slowly sinks down the swords, inch by inch. He feels the pressure of it, the brutal metallic presence of the swords, but, most peculiarly, he feels only mild pain—the insult to his body is so vast that it cannot, at first, be comprehended, and his senses, overwhelmed, cannot perceive what has happened to him. Pain is there to warn us that the body is in danger, but Michael is beyond warning now—just as you would not say “Be careful” to a man who has stepped off a ledge and is plunging into the chasm below; all you can do is watch.

  Michael turns his head for a last look at the world. As his eyes dim—it is as if they are filling up with milk—he sees Adam, his rosy lips twisted into a rictus of grief. At least, he thinks it is Adam. It all seems so far away. Michael feels the bronze blades going deeper and deeper. He wonders if there is anything he can do to save or prolong his life, but the possibility seems distant, unlikely—and far too much work. Half his brain is already in darkness, but with what is left he thinks how strange this is, to be dying on this day, and to just be letting it happen. He would have guessed it would be different, he would have guessed that he would struggle more vigorously instead of sinking into his own death like falling slowly slowly slowly to sleep after a long exhausting day.

  Gravity moves him another sixteenth of an inch down the length of Jagiello’s blades, until the tip of the north-pointing sword touches Michael’s heart. He lets out a cry, as if experiencing an electric shock. He hears someone calling his name. Who is that? Who is that? Xavier?

  Something is next to his face. A ghost. A bird. An angel. No… something else. Someone.

  Adam, his face streaked with tears. Oh! The child! The poor child! Michael reaches out, softly touches the boy’s hair in that moment of pure imagination, that crack in the dome, that single solitary fissure between the two states, the one that is so fleeting, and the one that is forever. In the final gasp, so much is revealed, and what is shown to Michael is not the secret of eternity or the meaning of life or, really, the meaning of anything, but merely that he was an exceptionally nice man, which may sound like very little but which is actually quite overwhelming, like the sounds of a chorus filling what had been an instant before a silent and empty room.

  Never before, never, have Adam and Alice seen their father in a state of fear. He in unhinged, undone. He bends over, his hands on his knees, his head down, panting and trying to catch his breath. Squiggles of saliva hang from his open mouth that, finally, he wipes away with the back of his hand. He stands straight again and surveys the scene with frightened eyes.

  Leslie is here, holding her cell phone in front of her, looking at it, showing it to Alex, as if the solution to all their problems might somehow be found in its circuitry. She is crying openly, the tears rushing out of her.

  “What did you do?” Alice wails.

  “Are you going to leave him there?” Adam shouts.

  “You threw him!”

  “He’s dying. Get him down he’s dying get him down.”

  The whoop of a siren announces that someone has called the police. The first car to arrive must have been close by to begin with, and the second arrives wailing as well and with its headlights flashing, which gives that squad car a panicked look, as if it were trying to escape from a criminal rather than apprehend one.

  Alex is suddenly very still. More sirens are on the way. An ambulance, a fire truck, more police. The air shakes with the noise of it. The caw of a million crows could not be more piercing. As the cops come out of their cars—two with Glocks already drawn—passersby gather, including a couple who actually witnessed Alex’s throwing Michael onto the king’s swords and who, despite their terror, are pointing at Alex, shouting to the police, “He’s the one! He killed that guy!”

  Leslie gathers her children close to her and they submit to her motherly touch. They have nowhere else to go.

  The firefighters are setting up a ladder next to the statue of the Polish king, whose crown and long hair are speckled and streaked with blood.

  Rodolfo, arriving from the north, crouches low on his skateboard. Behind him, in a V formation, are two of his buddies, and behind them are three other young folks who call the park home.

  Alex feels his blood surging and twisting through him like white water. As his family looks mutely on, he leaps over a bench, with two, now three, now four cops in close pursuit. He goes up the rise, through the dormant foliage, toward the low wall that marks the park’s eastern edge. The police don’t dare fire; beyond that wall is a busy sidewalk, and Fifth Avenue.

  The M1 bus, which runs down Fifth Avenue from Harlem to the East Village, weighs, before the first passenger steps in, over twelve tons, and the drum brakes are capable of stopping these behemoths, but they often must be pumped, and stopping the long, weighty vehicle is not instantaneous, far from it. The M1 that is now on its way, driven by a recent MTA hire named Mariano Gomez, is running four minutes behind schedule, and Gomez, who used to drive a bus in Lima, Peru, tries to make up one of those minutes, maybe even two, simply by getting past the light on Eighty-Sixth Street before it turns red.

  His bus is nearly full, though there are still empty seats and no apparent reason why this middle-aged woman with vivid orange hair and a black ski parka is standing on one foot in the aisle, her arms extended like a tightrope walker’s. Some new therapy. New exercise. Transcendental loco yoga. New York! He blesses the day he moved here. He notices her fingertips are stained black and he wonders if she is one of the city’s multitude of graffiti brujas—perhaps it was she and her compañeras who defaced the ad for Blood Sausage, writing This demeans women across the image of the female corpse hanging from a meat hook.

  Gomez glances at his speedometer and sees he is going forty-eight miles an hour. A bit friskier than he had intended. Then he hears sirens, and it’s like pressing the bar on his new fridge and having the ice cubes clatter into his glass, only the glass is the pit of his stomach. If he gets stopped for speeding, he’s through.

  Yet just as he is pressing his foot onto the long brake pedal, he sees something out of the corner of his eye, sees it without seeing it, it’s all too sudden, too fast. And the next thing he knows, a rich, once somewhat prominent New Yorker who has slowly faded from public life is running across Fifth Avenue, his route a broken line, a zigzag, like the graph of a volatile stock or the shining path of a lightning crack across the darkened sky.

  Gomez hits the brake with all the speed and force he has; the worn pads screech piteously against the drum. The woman on one foot somehow maintains her balance, but others on the bus do not fare as well, and a few of them slide right out of their seats as the M1 swerves, its backside pointing east, its front end veering west. Something—probably a taxi; every other car on Fifth Avenue is a taxi this time of day—hits him from behind, not hard. Some luck there. But the crazy man who has been dashing across Fifth, he’s got no luck at all. He looks about fi
fty, but, man, is he in good shape, with the moves of a superathlete. But he never had a chance, like a dog, like a crazy dog 90 percent instinct, helpless to stop when his legs say go. The guy just ran out and, despite Mariano Gomez’s best efforts, there is no avoiding him. He is hit, and hit good. He tried to jump out of the way, but the poor dog of a man just made matters worse. His face is pressed hard against the windshield; half his body too. When the bus comes to a halt, the guy is still stuck there, blood running out of his mouth, his nose. His eyes wide open but dead as rocks. Slowly, ever so slowly, his lifeless body slides down the windshield, falls backward, and hits the street, staring blindly at the cement sky, an odd point of peace and tranquillity in a world of sirens, honking, and the panicked human screams of passersby.

  Xavier opens his eyes just enough to see, as if trying to keep his having regained consciousness secret from whoever may be watching him. It has not yet penetrated his beleaguered mind that he is no longer being held captive. He sees strips of lighting on the ceiling, which tells him he is no longer in his cage, which, in turn, causes his heart to race. He closes his eyes again, waiting to settle down. He feels a heaviness covering him, and he opens his eyes ever so slightly again and through the mesh of his eyelashes he sees his chest, his whole torso covered in white. Surreptitiously, he touches what covers him—it’s cool, soft. A sheet? Many sheets?

  Sounds. The murmur of distant voices. The wobbly squeak of… what? Wheels? Something being carted away? Parts of him? He tenses the muscles of his legs. No: they’re still there. Presente. A steady gurgling. As if someone has placed a powerful microphone next to the surface of a pot of boiling rice. He moves his tongue around in his mouth. His mouth feels enormous and his tongue feels very small, like a mouse inside a cave. The feverish strangeness of this jolts him and he opens his eyes a little more, tries to sit up. Using his arms to push up. Except he doesn’t have arms. He has… arm. He peers over his left shoulder and sees the shoulder itself, a cluster of bandages, and then… a terrible, crushing absence.