I eased myself back into the apartment. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to follow him.”
Cath exhaled loudly. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, closing the window and heading toward the door. “We’ll take the stairs.”
“My hero.”
Stacey the fortune-teller was still cackling with laughter when we burst out of the front door a few moments later. We dodged an overworked dog-walker and his dozen yelping charges and headed for the corner of Avenue C, where I could see the doppelgänger standing just off the curb, raising his hand at passing cabs.
“The airport,” I said. “He’s going to the airport.”
He was still waiting as we neared, aware of our presence and checking frantically over his shoulder, but then I heard Cath cry out behind me and I tore my eyes off him and turned toward her.
She had tripped over some uneven pavement and was clutching at her knee in pain. “Go on!” she yelled when she saw me pause. “I’ll be fine.”
I hesitated, looked to see the doppelgänger flag down a taxi and leap into the backseat, and then looked back at Cath. Damn.
“What are you doing?” she said when I knelt down beside her. “He’s getting away.”
“We’ll catch him,” I said, moving her hands from her knee. “Let’s see the damage.”
It wasn’t bad—just a ferocious scrape rimmed with red, familiar to anyone who ever had a BMX bike and no appreciable balance. “Damn it.” Cath bit her lip and one tear spilled out of her left eye. “That is going to leave a hellacious bruise.”
I stood and helped her up. “You’re going to survive, tiger. Now do you want to go home or do you want to continue the chase?”
“Did Samwise Gamgee abandon Frodo when the going got tough?” Cath scoffed.
I threw her arm around my neck, and we three-legged-raced our way to the corner and raised our hands to flag down a cab of our own. “Cath,” I said, “we’re not gay hobbits.”
She elbowed me in the side. “Speak for yourself, creepo.”
I looked up the street and saw the doppelgänger’s cab stopped at a red light, just one block away. We were lucky—luckier still when a taxi screeched to a halt in front of us. I helped Cath in, then raced around to the other side and took a seat behind the driver, a young African guy with chipmunk cheeks and a shaved head. “Where to?” he said in a thickly accented voice.
I leaned forward and pointed through the safety screen that separated the front and back seats. “Do you see that cab up there? The one stopped at the light?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I need you to follow it.”
We stayed parked.
“Sir?” The cab driver seemed puzzled.
“That cab,” I said urgently. “Please—I need you to follow it. Now.”
He turned to face me. “Seriously?”
Through the grimy windshield I saw the traffic light change to green. I felt wildly impotent. “Yes!” I yelped, my voice cracking. “Please! Follow that cab!”
The driver flexed his fingers around the wheel. “Like in the movies?”
I was near tears. “Yes! Just like in the movies! Please!” But we didn’t move, and I slumped back against the seat.
The driver, whose ID said his name was Demba Diop, turned back to face us gravely. “Sir,” he said, “I have been driving this taxi for sixteen years. Sixteen years. And I have been waiting every single one of them for just this occasion.” He flooded the engine with gas. “I will not let you down!”
And with a violent screech we tore away from the curb, leaving a symphony of honking horns in our wake.
Cath and I fought the g-forces that were pinning us to the seat and reached wildly for our safety belts. When they were properly fastened, she let out a low whistle. “Man,” she said, “so this is how it all ends? With a wild chase scene? Talk about your clichés.”
“Hey,” I said, “don’t knock it. Clichés get overused for a reason.” I grimaced as we caught air going over a manhole at Thirteenth Street. “Besides”—I turned toward her, but her eyes were shut tight and she was yanking on the handle above the window like it was a parachute rip cord—“you have to admit this is kind of exciting.”
The cab’s tires squealed on the asphalt as we hung a violent right on Fourteenth Street. Cath didn’t open her eyes. “Wake me when we’re not dead, OK, hotshot?”
The driver was hooting with laughter. “I think he is going for the FDR Drive, sir!”
I swallowed my stomach back down as we shot a yellow light, and leaned forward. “He’s probably heading to the airport!” I shouted. “JFK.”
“No problem, sir. I know all the shortcuts!”
“That’s what I was afraid of!” I said, and sunk back into the seat. The doppelgänger’s cab was still in sight when we zoomed up the on-ramp to the FDR, but by the time we had merged into the ocean of northbound cars it was gone. As if he could sense my tension, the driver hammered down on the wheel and the taxi shimmied across two lanes of speeding traffic before easing balletically and near-suicidally into the left lane, neatly cutting off an eighteen-wheeler. The doppelgänger was two cars in front. Our driver would be lethal at Tetris, I thought. The insulted truck let out a furious honk, and Cath’s hand skittered across the seat, found my hand, and squeezed it. I squeezed back.
We took the Queens Midtown Tunnel to the LIE, but traffic backed up again as we approached the Van Wyck. Our driver noticed the doppelgänger’s cab slowly cutting across lanes, heading to the right side of the highway. We followed and at one point got nearly close enough to make eye contact, but unlike us, he seemed unconcerned about the chase. He was sitting calmly, eyes forward. Cath rolled down her window and shouted out to him, but he didn’t react at all.
She said, “For someone who just crawled out of a window, he seems awfully chill.”
“That’s because he thinks he’s got it all figured out. What does he have to worry about?”
Cath turned to me. “Does he?”
I shook my head. “Nope. He’s got nothing at all.”
But then his cab took a random eastbound exit and was gone. “Damn!” I shouted. “We lost him!”
Our driver seemed unperturbed. “Sir, please sit back and enjoy the ride. I promised you I would not fail, and I do not make promises lightly.”
We lurched off the road onto the shoulder and sped down the next exit ramp. I watched through the safety glass as the speedometer flirted with seventy-five. The driver steered us onto some awfully suburban-looking streets, and for the first time since we had left my apartment I felt a twinge of fear. What if we didn’t catch him? What if it didn’t end tonight? He was heading to The Hague. He had called Amy and said God knows what. This was a deeper violation than anything he had done before. The leather-clad life he had been swimming in—with its drugs, DJing, and divas—had merely been a distraction. It was an unreal part of myself that he had made painfully real. But now he was headed straight for the realest thing I’d ever had—rocketing toward it like some sort of vindictive missile. If he were to get on that plane, all I’d be left with was the mess he’d made. Something shallow. Something tawdry and unkempt. A daze of nights. Half a life.
I leaned forward. “We have to catch that cab.”
The driver shook his head and sped up a side street, then skidded through a ferocious turn. “You, my young friend, worry too much.” The brakes squealed as we stopped at a light adjacent to the expressway. “Here is your prey.” He gestured to the taxi that was idling just in front of us. Through the windshield I saw the back of my own head. It was him. “We have caught him,” said the driver. “Now: What would you like to do? In one film I saw—a very good film!—the one taxi drove the other one into a ditch by ramming it in the side like this!” He clapped his palms together loudly.
“No! I mean—no. That won’t be necessary. Let’s just get to the airport at the same time.”
“You’re sure, si
r? We could easily ram them—”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “Very sure.”
The driver shrugged. “Whatever you say, sir.” The light changed and we drove on at a more humane speed.
Cath tugged at my arm. “It doesn’t seem like he’s noticed us.”
We could still make out the doppelgänger’s form staring blankly at the road ahead. “No, you’re right.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe he just doesn’t believe that we can stop him. Or that we’d want to.”
“Are you going to fight him again? Is it going to be like that weird movie with Sean Connery in the skirt and the French guy who has that giant sword and…”
“Highlander. And no—I already tried that line of thinking. No violence.”
“But then how are you going to stop him?”
“I’ve already stopped him,” I said calmly. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
When we reached the outskirts of JFK, I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu. And then I realized that I was actually the third version of me to be at the airport that day. I wondered if there was a separate French phrase for just such a scenario.
Our driver had dutifully avoided ramming the doppelgänger’s cab during the rest of the ride, and now he kept a respectful distance as we took the exit for the international terminal.
“You are leaving the country, sir?” asked the driver.
“One of us is,” I said. Cath gave me a surprised look but kept quiet. The doppelgänger directed his taxi to pull over in front of the same airline I had flown to Utah—I guess great minds think alike—and I directed our driver to do the same. I handed two twenties—the last cash I had on me—through the partition and told him to keep the change.
“Thank you, sir. And thank you both for allowing me to realize my most longed-for American dream.”
“The pleasure was all ours,” I said as we slid out of the backseat. “And if I ever need to ram someone, I will be sure to flag you down.”
We could still hear the driver’s laughter after we shut the door. All around us, skycaps buzzed like wasps, checking baggage, opening limo doors, and pushing trolleys piled high with suitcases. The doppelgänger took his time counting his change before opening the door and stepping out onto the sidewalk. He slammed the door behind him and then stretched grandly as if he were only now greeting the dawn. He didn’t even turn around.
“Hey!” I shouted out to him.
Slowly he turned with a look of total confusion on his face. It wasn’t just that he was surprised, it was as if he were seeing us in a different language. Cath, getting into the swing of things, put her hands on her hips like an Old West sheriff and yelled, “End of the line, asshole!”
The doppelgänger’s shoulders slumped. He seemed more disappointed than scared. He said one word—“Why?”—and then sprinted across the street, dodging taxis, heading away from the terminal and toward the parking garage.
“Oh, Christ,” said Cath. “Here we go again!”
“No.” I put a steadying hand on her arm. “You wait here. I don’t want you running on that knee.”
“Thanks, Rex Gordon, but I’m fine.”
I looked in her blue eyes. “Wait for me here. I have to do this alone.”
She started to protest, but then her eyes softened and she nodded. I took off toward the garage.
The first level of parking was lousy with SUVs, white Lexus whales, and Fords better suited to paramilitary operations than escorting plastic surgeons and their families back to Long Island. I cut up row A, then ducked down behind a gaudy yellow Hummer and followed the steady clip-clop of the doppelgänger’s footsteps over to row G. I thought I had him then, and I leapt out from behind a space-age Suburu only to scare about five years off the life of a hobbled and bearded Hasidic Jew. “Sorry,” I said, patting him on his frail shoulders as I caught a glimpse of the doppelgänger cutting up a set of cement stairs to the second floor.
I took the stairs three at a time, my heart in a brutal race with my lungs. The second floor was full near the stairs and then thinned out toward the ramp up to the roof. I saw the doppelgänger almost get mowed down by a Jeep that was backing out in a hurry and then watched him take off toward the ramp. He was running the way I was taught in gym class: knees high, arms steadily swinging at the sides. I shouted out to him to stop, but my voice echoed off the low ceiling, and what ricocheted back into my ears sounded tinny and hollow. I saw him break into the sunlight of the ramp and ran after him, knowing that this time for sure I would join that gym.
I caught up to him on the roof, which was empty save for an unoccupied police van and a gang of pigeons snacking on a smashed bag of Herr’s potato chips in the shade of the far wall. The sounds of jet planes were everywhere, and the sun beat down bluntly on the exposed asphalt, making the air shiny and sticky with reflected light and heat. He stood in the middle of the roof, hands on knees, catching his breath. I felt for him—I wanted to do the exact same thing. There was a burn in my throat from breathing so hard, and my feet ached.
He watched me approach but didn’t make any effort to escape; he just slowly regained his breath and uncurled his back to stand straight and face me. We stared at each other for a time, through the looking glass that wasn’t there, until he spoke first. “You look different,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“So you made up your mind after all.”
“That’s right.”
“What was it? The party? The plane ticket?”
“The phone call,” I said.
The doppelgänger snapped his fingers. “Right! Right. The phone call. She was very sweet, you know. She was very excited to see…well, one of us. She said we were finally making an effort. Finally ready to move on to the next stage.”
I nodded. “She’s right. I am.”
He looked forlorn. “Yeah. She’s always right, isn’t she?”
“That she is.”
“Oh, well.” He reached into his pocket and handed me my passport. “You’d better hurry,” he said. “You’ve got about ten minutes left to check in.”
“Thanks. The rest of it?”
The doppelgänger chuckled. “Can’t blame me for trying.” He dug around in his back pocket and produced the extra keys, my wallet, and finally the folded-over photo of Amy. “I wouldn’t use the Visa for a while if I were you. I think it’s, ah…overdrawn.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
The doppelgänger flickered a little, like a television during a thunderstorm. “You know, I really thought there was a chance for both of us.”
I shook my head. “Come on, now. ‘A house divided against itself’ and all that.”
He nodded, blinking on and off like a light switch. “You’re right, you’re right. Can’t be all one thing all the time, I guess. Oh, well.” He turned and started to walk toward the far part of the wall where the pigeons were feasting, the only part darkened by shadows. Then he stopped and turned back to me, a wistful look on his face. “Don’t forget about me, now.”
I laughed. “How could I?”
He flashed me the shit-eating grin of old. “There’s no way in hell you could.” Then he walked, diminishing with every step, into the shadows.
When I got back to where I’d left her, Cath was smoking a cigarette and flirting with a meaty skycap who looked like an extra from the Gotti crime-family picnic. She was wearing his hat, and her face was twisted up and her hands dancing, the way she always was when she was telling a particularly juicy story. I smiled at the sight of it.
“Hey!” she shouted when she saw me walking across the street. She snapped the cap back on her new friend’s prodigious head, crushed the cigarette under her foot, and ran over to me, grabbing at my arms the way one would a long-lost relative. “Are you OK? What happened?”
“I’m great,” I said, throwing my arm around her shoulders and walking her back up onto the curb. “I’m bette
r than I’ve been in a long, long time.”
“Yeah?” She squinted up at my face. “Yeah. You look it. But what happened to him?”
“We don’t need to worry about him anymore.”
“Jesus, that sounds ominous! What, did you kill him? Has he been officially ‘disappeared’?”
I smiled. “He can’t disappear. He’s right here. I just…what’s the phrase? Pulled myself together.”
Cath smiled back. “Wild. That was like a kumate.”
“A what, now?”
She gave me a playful shove. “You know—a kumate. Like in those Asian kickboxing movies? ‘Two men enter…one man leave!’”
I laughed. “I think that actually does pretty much sum it up.”
“So now what? You sweep me off my feet? Now that you’ve vanquished your ne’er-do-well rival, we ride off together into the sunset?”
I looked at the ground. “Actually,” I said, “what happens now is I get on a plane.”
The words hung in the air between us for an extra moment, and then Cath simply shrugged. “Yeah, I figured as much. What was it my mom told me when I was a little girl? ‘Never fall for the nerdy sweet guys with girlfriends and raging, externalized ids’?”
I looked up at her. “She was a wise lady.”
“Yup. She was.” Cath tweaked my nose with her thumb and forefinger. “So you’re just going to fly off to Europe now with no baggage?”
“That’s the idea.”
She nodded. “I hope you fix things up with Annie.”
“Amy.”
“Riiiiiight. Her. I bet you will.”
“Thanks. I hope so. You know what? I bet she’d like you.”
Cath’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”
“Well, maybe. Eventually. Once she got to know you. After a few drinks, perhaps.”
Cath gave my chest a last hearty smack. “One to grow on, creepo. So you’re really going to tell her all about this? All about me?”
“You know it,” I said. “I’m not making the same mistake again. From now on, I’m an open book.” I spread my arms out wide.
“It’s funny,” said Cath, turning thoughtful. “If you were ever to write this all down, I bet it’d be just as crazy and exciting and wild as all the diaries you used to spend all your time reading.”
Miss Misery Page 30
