“I’m not scared,” I wheezed and coughed as the cement moved beneath me and I rolled on the ground, gripping my solar plexus in a vain effort to make it all stop. Fleeger scooped up the metal ashtray by the door to impale it through the window or my chest. I moved at the last moment and it struck the mass of my arm, inflicting soft tissue damage. No objective evidence of permanent injury. I stood up. He rammed me again with the base of the ashtray and knocked me to the ground again.
“Take a shot, Harker,” Robert commanded, now above me. “Come on. I’ll give you a shot.”
“Robert, don’t,” Kath said as Fleeger pulled back the ashtray to harpoon me with its base. The halogen streetlights above him formed three large yellow crosses. A celebratory spotlight danced across the dense, low cloud cover that separated the city from the sky. Fleeger cursed me again. “You’re a fucking asshole, you know that, Stephen?” Then he paused and looked at me, his expression changed, from anger to curiosity, and he pointed in another direction. He wanted me to see too. The grainy sidewalk scraped against my cheek as I turned my head, to face the direction of Fleeger’s finger, north on Fifteenth Street. Where, in a tricorne hat, stood Thomas, gaunt and patchy beneath the electric red lights of an Applebee’s Grill & Bar. Costumed like a minuteman in breaches and buckled boots, leather jacket, full-length navy great coat, russet wide belt.
I knew that rifle. It was a Kentucky rifle. My father once possessed one. There were tricks to making it right and Thomas knew what he was doing. The long rifle cradled horizontal across his body, tamping the black powder from a leather and brass flask, tapping the flint. Now he was done. Thomas dropped to one knee and pulled the trigger. An electric cloud of urea and sulfur enveloped him in gray smoke. I could see the iron musket ball, traveling at six hundred feet per second, like Sputnik, circling the planet with whiskers of antennae, broadcasting Cold War messages from the ionosphere, four hundred foot-pounds of pressure per inch. Plenty enough to penetrate Fleeger’s skull. An infinite number of choices over an unknown number of lifetimes necessary for that consummation to occur. Consequences of decisions rippling ever outward. The force of the impact popped something inside him. I didn’t hear it. I felt it through the ground. Followed by a silent internal ringing alarm. Like the noise employed by an audiologist to test your hearing. Deafening me to Kath on her knees yelling and picking up Fleeger’s head. His beautiful head. Now something inanimate. Almost like a melon. Its operating system failing as it struggled to reboot and deaf to Thomas’s whistling as he removed another musket ball from his leather pouch, detached the ramrod from the rifle’s barrel, folded a sabot around the musket ball to maximize velocity, and punched the musket ball into the nether regions of the rifle’s barrel. Preparations complete to fire another shot as Fleeger lay next to me gurgling. Shiny metal parts oiled and clean. Perhaps this one for me. Perhaps I deserved it. A brain for a brain. A pop for a pop.
As if performing microscopic experiments in a laboratory, Thomas closed one eye and peered down the barrel. He presented his arms for inspection, spun the rifle on its butt, placed the musket beneath his chin, and fired the thing with the toe of his buckled boot. No electric cloud of black smoke this time as together the energy and the matter followed the path of least resistance. Tossing what was once part of Thomas’s brain up against the window of the Applebee’s. City kids in the window with a natural look of wonder on their faces. Eating onion rings dipped in ketchup. Whoa.
Kath hyperventilated and beat Robert’s chest. Here now was Benjamin. His work boots standing in the blood flowing from Fleeger’s scalped head. Benjamin picked up Kath with his strange tattooed hands as Fleeger mouthed something he never said before and would never say again. I sat on the sidewalk cross-legged and listened to his final breaths. To his tongue lolling inside his mouth. Consciousness flickering across the still intact sections of his brain, as he turned tallow on the street, surrounded by gawkers, the man revealed himself to me. And it was then, at that moment, that I realized how much I loved him.
28
I LAY IN BED playing memory roulette. Riding alongside the Quiché in the back of a runaway pickup. Dragoning heroin with Moroccans in Málaga. Dancing in Haidian with a Chinese woman tattooed with eyeliner. Kath handing Mei the red box of silver ornaments and Fleeger wishing me Merry Christmas as he handed me the bonus check.
“Don’t thank me, Stephen. Thank yourself. Really. You’ve done a great job this year.”
All of it lost. Yet still I couldn’t comprehend it. Because as a concept loss was not something I could feel. Despite the fact it had now piled up around me. Like icebergs on the shore of a frozen sea. The distant land to where things disappear. Instead, I felt intact, whole, solid, certain that not one chunk of myself had been displaced. Despite all that had occurred.
I dressed in the dark and slapped the doorframe as I exited the apartment, feeling capable of something new, as if overnight I had grown giant, skilled hands. Gregg sat on the stoop, drinking cappuccino from a bowl-sized mug.
“What are you, a longshoreman today?” he asked.
I shrugged. Kath’s bicycle still bolted to the building. Tires ripped on purpose by something serrated that required force. It didn’t matter. We would never speak again.
“Can you tell your friend to move this?” he said, pointing to the bicycle. “It’s becoming an eyesore.”
“Sure, Gregg.” I paused. “Can I ask you something?”
He said of course I could ask him something.
“Remember that delivery man you said was looking for me?”
“Kind of. But that seems so long ago.”
“You said he was clean shaven. You sure about that?”
“Oh, heavens. I don’t know, Stephen,” Gregg replied. “I’m really very bad with details.”
I told him I thought so and then walked to the subway. A dusty haze hovered above the gray asphalt. Of ozone in spring. Its billion particles reflected and energized by the white morning sun. I entered the subway and stepped through the car’s sliding doors and took a hard orange seat beneath a ribbons of adverts. The science of extralong lashes. Dr. Zog will beautify your dog. You too can own your own home for just under $325,000. I wanted to date the women in the period-proof underwear ads, digitally peeled into garnish while yogaing in tank tops.
The imagined stories of those around us. Eyes closed in silent prayer to arrive safely. A bookmark fashioned from a 9/11 mass card beneath a face etched by sixteen-plus years of grief. Mouthing hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, behind lipstick. Leather-bound Judaica exhorting the faithful to atone. A Pakistani man pushing the button on a small device attached to his finger, counting his pulse. A blue-eyed Slav, face hidden by a black balaclava, glaring at me as he grooved a line into the plastic subway seat with a carpentry nail. A teenage girl, face hidden beneath a floppy cap pinned with a velvet tulip, rubbing the palm of her hennaed hand while her father, some poet emeritus, with a brass scarab fastened tight around his neck, rested his chin on the handle of his goose-headed cane. This day out and about with his daughter. This day of new experiences. I nodded at him. He nodded back. The train scattered rainbow-colored lights through the prism of the rear window, behind us, swirling in an optical illusion of carbon and speed.
I exited the subway at Chambers Street and walked south toward the stolid almost-Presbyterian Catholic church and climbed the steep concrete steps and entered tight, consecutive glass doors. Dipped my fingers in the marble basin of cool holy water and genuflected. Said a prayer for Fleeger and touched the Jesus foot of the pietà. I was the first to arrive. I sat in the transept and waited for the service to begin.
“Does anyone have a few words they would like to say about Robert?” the priest asked the congregants.
I raised my hand. He ignored me. Someone must have pointed me out beforehand. Instructed him anyone but me. That guy. Hiding in the shadows behind the columns. The reason we’re all gathered here today. The reason Robert Fleeger is dead.
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My hands needed something to do. I wouldn’t check the newswires or email anymore. I rolled a cigarette instead. My fingers shook at a high frequency. I heard them. They sounded like an orchestra of mosquito wings. I snapped the crooked cigarette in two. Looked over my shoulder at Our Lady of Copacabana preserved inside her glass box. Doll tiny and fierce and wrapped in wax and peach chiffon and lace, staring at me with her timeless black doll eyes.
Now if the priest would just give me the chance. Show some compassion. If so, I was prepared. I had notes. A scroll of notes tucked here inside my jacket. Typed and edited and torn by the awl of my ballpoint pen. The complete record of what went wrong. From then to now. Here to there. And though perhaps there were too many facts and details, there was a lesson to be learned and it boils down to this.
Distraction was the root of all evil.
“A few words about Robert?” the priest asked again.
Round white beard. White stole. White hair. His spotless yolk-yellow robe swayed an inch above his soft black shoes, his Velcro almost-sneakers. He marked the gilded page with a wooden reed ordained for such a task and closed the purple catechism.
I stood and approached the lectern. Not just a consumer anymore but also a critic. They looked at me like I was slithering on my belly, snapping the air with rows of jagged teeth. Writhing across the dunes of yellow sand in a torn, coarse robe, weepy with conjunctivitis, in search of salt water and fish. Some things were doomed to fail and die, I thought. Even relish it. Take it easy, I told myself. Calm down, calm down. This is not about you. It’s about Robert.
The priest looks at me. His chinstrap beard jutted almost an inch from his chin. I felt as if I were standing before God’s own lieutenant. I removed my black watch cap. Apply nothing to anything I told myself as I extracted the notes. Enter the gateless gate. All you need to do is read.
To my surprise, the priest raised the microphone and motioned for me to take his place. I stood there at the lectern, in the scent of the church. The meter-high candles flickered before me. Subtle notes of advent and paraffin. Candles dipped by cloistered Bolivian nuns that would require one hundred years to burn. Thurible smoking Catholic incense. One tall candle burned at each corner of Fleeger’s granite urn.
Cross sections of his life occupied the pews before me. An isocephaly of saints and demons. Color-coded women in heels and miniskirts. I expected them to do a number, like the Rockettes. Oh, what a Fleeger! Something along those lines. The Kilgore partners and Attika pewed together, checking their phones, muffling displeasure at my audacity to speak at Robert Fleeger’s funeral. Fleeger’s family up front, massive blue-blooded American Hapsburgs. The women of the clan strong-jawed sentries of where fetuses gestate into Fleegers. Celeste Powers in black, sponged with foundation, weeping into a cocktail napkin, examining its contents, platinum quatrefoil still spinning at her wrist. Tucker Nelson wearing a seersucker suit before Memorial Day to a Manhattan funeral mass. Perhaps he was off to Belmont later that afternoon, on another firm’s dime. And Kath O’Shaugnessy, sitting alone in the back by the heavy glass doors. Angry and hiding and ashamed behind sunglasses and grips and knots of her once-again black hair. Benjamin was here before as well; he exited the moment the priest handed me the microphone.
All of them now before us. Before me and Fleeger. Together again for one last time. The death of a man was the death of a friendship. I removed the notes from my pocket and flattened the pages against the lectern and set to the task of clearing my conscience. The one last thing I had to do before Fleeger’s entombment. To prevent some part of me being buried with him.
“At the time of his untimely death, that honest Yankeeness that Robert Fleeger once possessed was not completely spent. Becoming partner at Kilgore had consumed about half of it. And another couple tons were incinerated by his separation from Kath O’Shaughnessy. And, true, before he was shot in the head by a mentally disturbed claimant, he was engaging in an unseemly amount of online dating. But some core of who he was always remained intact. And like all my friendships that survived the transition to adulthood, I loved him. Very dearly …”
The exodus had already ended. Even Fleeger was gone. Like Benjamin, his family exited the church the moment I began to speak, cradling his granite box. Probably through the Holland Tunnel by now. Heading north in a fleet of black German sedans. Silent on leather cushions. The lead car bearing Robert’s ashes. Only the priest remained. To bear witness and then to bolt the glass doors behind me.
The last of the congregants rounded street corners and descended subway steps as I exited the church and walked to the office. The palm scanner denied me access to the building’s elevator banks. I squeezed past the turnstile and rode the elevator to Kilgore. Money Man pushing big gains in aluminum futures. Advising his audience that it might be time again to take another look at freight derivatives, folks.
During my absence from the office the work piled atop my desk. Bills of particular. Responses to discovery demands. Requests for production. Notices to admit. Summonses. Complaints. Subpoenas. I sat behind the papers, holding a fax from Lazlis’s office advising Judge McKenzie he would amend his complaint to include claims for wrongful death on behalf of Thomas’s estate. Another from the Fleegers’ family lawyer demanding preservation of the entire Thomas file. Through binoculars I studied the prewar apartment building across the street, now undergoing demolition and renovation. Floors torn up and walls knocked down. Spaces opened and the sockets stripped, with pipes and wires dangling from the ceiling and overhead hazards marked by strips of yellow tape.
I entered the conference room and glided my hand along the wall of Thomas’s boxes and discovered an unopened padded envelope from Honda Investigations addressed to Fleeger. The disc downloaded its contents to the hard drive and the videotaped footage bounced around the flatscreen. Kath’s boots up a flight of subway stairs. Safari jeans jaywalking across Broadway. Me, pensive, behind the table at Shoemacher’s, as Kath applies lipstick in the mirror of her phone. I stand behind the table and welcome her with kisses. Now at night as I walk the sidewalks. Surprised by my height, by my nocturnal, upright posture. In and out of bars and halfway up the Williamsburg Bridge. Up Kath’s stairs. Down Kath’s stairs. Boarding the Amtrak. Fingering the tears to Kath’s shredded bicycle tires.
I looked up from my computer screen and there stood Fleeger in the doorframe. Not holding his Kilgore tote, not scrolling through his phone, but staring at me with dead black eyes and his iron brow furrowed with betrayal.
“You still owe me for that sign you smashed,” I said.
“I do?”
“Yes. You do.”
“I don’t know, Stephen. I think we’re even.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Beer later?”
“Sounds good.”
He vanished.
29
I READ THE WORDS on the pages around me. Scooped up the minutes and words like fungible dice. I shook them in my hand and then shot them across the desk. An order from the court arrived in my inbox, regarding a different file. Words that meant nothing. Because there were too many of them. They spilled from the pages. Floated around the paper and buzzed on the screen. “And a plague of words shall go upon thee, Pharaoh.” I felt guilty of a new felony. The abuse of words.
Goldman entered my office. Bespoke suit. Hair gelled with a product whose sale is limited to millionaires. His forehead and scalp flaky and inflamed where a dermatologist applied a chemical peel to remove suspicious basal cells.
“Stephen, the partners have made a decision,” he said. “We want a full report by tomorrow morning latest as to just what this Thomas file entails. His psychological condition. His physical condition. His medications. And most importantly, who knew what and when about this man’s mental instability. Including you, including Robert, including Celeste. We need a full, detailed report. You think you can manage that?”
I grinned.
“Maybe we should assign this to At
tika instead. Give you a little break.”
For hours I sat there. The buildings outside were LEGO pieces. Erector set joints. Plastic Ts with serpent eyes. Fallen bricks. Worldscore One now spiked with a brand-new pickelhaube.
I opened the door to the janitor’s closet. Calcium-crusted custodial sink and industrial gallons of pink liquid. I extracted the Virgin Mary night cart, rolled it to the conference room, and stacked it high with Thomas’s boxes. Six high by six deep times two. For the protection of the attorney-claimant privilege. Per the dictates of military confidentiality. To extinguish the liens on the compensation. Collateralized. Assigned to paper. Securitized. Insured. Obligated. Sold. Brokered. The brewing battle over who bore responsibility. I had an answer for that. We all bore responsibility. For what we did to them and what they did to others and what we did to ourselves.
Top-heavy and wobbly, the cart steadied as I pushed it into the building’s freight elevator. Together, Thomas and I exited the building though the parking garage, unmolested by the valets praying in the corner facing east beneath the pipes. I pressed the cart north on Water Street. Past skyscrapers rising at narrow angles. I pushed on toward the bridges. Again remembered the old, lost friend who climbed them to overcome his fear of heights. The cart’s plastic casters rolled over cobblestones. The boxes teetered but would not fall. I lifted the cart over a curb.
Together, Thomas and I entered the protestor’s camp. Past an unfathomable linga yoni bathed in fresh milk and ringed with marigolds. Rows of girls sipping tea before the night’s work, the names of their pimps tattooed to their exposed coccyges. I offloaded a box from the cart and set it next to a young protestor stoking a cooking fire with a radio antennae. He looked at me. Opened the box. Removed a handful of Thomas’s military records and placed it on the charcoals. He smiled at me with big gaps between his teeth. The papers burned bright and quick, sizzling his small filet roasting atop a scavenged grate.
All the Beautiful People We Once Knew Page 28
