White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

  The movers came back a couple of hours later. They banged on the locked door and cursed at me in their language. After a while they went away. Only then did it occur to me to think about the studio. I ran down the stairs and cycled over, arriving drenched in sweat. I fumbled with the key in the lock. As I had feared, it didn’t work. I banged on the door with my fists, calling out to Carter, as if it was all a terrible misunderstanding and he would shamble to the door and open it up and let me in and everything would be the same again, just like before.

  —CORNELIUS? I’M LOCKED OUT. Yes, that’s right. What? What do you mean? That’s ridiculous. We have projects, contracts. Yes, I’ve got proof. Of course I’ve got proof. I don’t understand why you would do this. Cornelius? Hello?

  Please take notice that a judgment has been made in the above proceeding giving Wallace Magnolia Properties LLC possession of the premises now occupied by you.

  —Surely I have some rights in this situation. That’s not fair. He’s my friend. I would never. Well, it was a verbal contract. No. Of course not. That’s completely unreasonable. If I want a what? What? Of course I don’t want to make a claim against your family. This is my life we’re talking about. I need to get into that studio.

  An order of eviction has been issued empowering the marshal to remove you and your belongings

  —I have nowhere to go. I’m your brother’s best friend. That’s not true. How can you even say that? I am not. I resent that. No way.

  Your problems are not my problems, Cornelius says in his impermeable voice. The family has been advised that it is unlikely that Carter will wake from his coma. They see no reason to wait to put his affairs in order. It’s not the family’s fault that I didn’t respond to earlier attempts to contact me. If you wish to bring suit, you should feel free to have your lawyer call mine.

  I am unable to separate one thing from another. It all comes at me in a swirl, a storm. The casual way he says that Carter will never wake up. The knowledge that I have nothing, that at a stroke he has taken it all from me. The way he can tell me all this in his unreachable, impermeable voice.

  as provided by law the undersigned will execute such order of eviction

  —Goodbye. Please don’t use this number again.

  WITHOUT ACCESS TO THE STUDIO, only two threads connected me to Carter: his records and a copy of the picture Leonie had taken in the ICU, the selfie with her bandaged intubated brother. I’d got hold of her phone one evening while she was in the bathroom and sent it to myself. Beautiful Carter smashed and punctured, his mouth open for the ventilator. Back at the empty loft, I pushed his bed against the door of his room and spent long periods, sometimes hours at a time, staring at it as I listened to his records. It had a terrible beauty. Brother and sister in extremis. Carter wired to drips and monitors, Leonie staring into the lens as if it were the barrel of a gun.

  Since my clothes had been taken by the movers, I began to dress in Carter’s, which fit me well enough: his selvedge denim jeans, his soft cotton shirts, work boots I padded with two pairs of socks so they didn’t slip. I packed some of his clothes into a small backpack along with a few toiletries and some other useful items from his room—a little hunting knife, a pocket flashlight, forcing myself out of my prostration to prepare for what I knew would eventually happen. I locked my bike to a railing at the other end of the block, so I wouldn’t be left without transport. Then I took the walnut box of records and moved it to a locker in a nearby storage unit. The varnished wood was slick in my sweaty hands as I walked to the storage facility, an old industrial building with bricked-up windows and primary-colored signage facing the street. I focused on the need to be careful, to be precise in each step, to avoid obstacles, objects on the ground or uneven paving slabs. Technically this was theft, but I was the only person who understood the significance of Carter’s collection and I felt this gave me some kind of moral right of guardianship. Though the records were worth thousands of dollars, I had no interest in their market value. They were a vital clue to what was happening to us, what I had begun to think of as a jinx, a curse that had put Carter in the hospital and was grinding my own life to powder. If Cornelius took those records, I would never be able to save his brother. It was imperative to keep them under my control. I zipped the storage unit key into a small pocket in the backpack. Every time I went to get groceries (this was the only reason I left Carter’s room at all during those days) I took the backpack with me. When Corny’s men finally broke in and changed the locks, leaving me outside on the street, I was ready.

  As I was trying to fit my key in the door, two men got out of a car and began walking towards me. I ran, but they didn’t follow. I was on my own. A bike, a few clothes. The records, though I had nothing to play them on.

  After that, waiting became my life. Waiting outside the hospital where Carter was being kept, waiting outside Cornelius’s office. Waiting on the sidewalk outside Leonie’s building, in the basement bar with the fights playing on the bulbous black-and-white TV. I sat on a bench in Tompkins Square. I hovered on the corner near the studio. I slept in various places. It was summer: you could put a camping mat or some cardboard down on the sidewalk and no one would bother you, as long as you picked a quiet spot.

  I stood on the sidewalk opposite Leonie’s building and waited for her to come out. I waited outside her building, standing on the sidewalk. Two hours the first day, three the second, until my feet hurt and my bladder was swollen full.

  At last she came out. So quick, it would have been easy to miss her. The doorman helped her into a town car, which immediately pulled away. I got on my bike and followed the big black Lincoln uptown through heavy traffic. Past Houston it pulled away, disappearing up Tenth Avenue. I stepped on the pedals, skirting potholes and bumping over the lips of those giant metal slabs that utility companies throw down when they’re excavating the road. I was streaming with sweat by the time I spotted the car in Chelsea, parked on a block lined with art galleries. I could see Leonie herself, waiting on the curb in the heat, tenanting a small patch of shade and smoking a cigarette. I leaned on the handlebars as I watched her, trying to gulp enough air into my lungs to slow my racing heart. I could smell the hot stink of my unwashed body, the telltale scent of the outsider. A second car pulled up and a man got out. I saw the wavy boyish hair, a pair of dark glasses pushed up into it like a headband. Marc. So Marc was still in the picture.

  A white-walled former warehouse with a sealed concrete floor. Quickly past the woman at the desk, too preoccupied with her email to look up. The cavern contained a single row of vast paintings, monuments of banality, wallpaper patterns stenciled in metal-flake car paint and fields of dots that on closer inspection turned out to be candy. I didn’t dare get very close to Leonie and Marc. I didn’t need to. I had my recorder, my binaurals. The mics in my ears could pick up her voice.

  —It’s very impressive.

  Marc said he’d been offered another from the same series, almost identical. He wasn’t sure the work would hold its value. She told him she thought it was good. Challenging, yes, but some of the artist’s best work. He was a friend of hers, in fact. I recognized the name, the bearded loudmouth who’d insulted her at dinner.

  As they left, they walked straight past me, as if I wasn’t there. I think Leonie genuinely didn’t see me, but I had the sense that something more was at work, that my ordinary insubstantiality had intensified. I picked up a short conversation on the sidewalk. Marc making a half-hearted promise to call Leonie, her telling him he’d better, trying to sound casual and sassy. You better, she said, pointing pistol fingers at him, a self-conscious gesture that she held for a moment, then withdrew. You better call. He drove off and left her on the sidewalk.

  Silence. The phone echoing in the high-ceilinged gallery, sound waves bouncing off the great big shiny surfaces of the art.

  I stepped forward, ready to say please Leonie. I stepped forward in the gallery, on the sidewalk outside the gallery. Please Leonie, let me expla
in. The ringing phone, the shiny paintings. But she got back into her own car and it pulled away, leaving me alone in my sweat and stink. After that I drifted through the city on foot, recording. That was the summer I drifted through the city. Did I already say that? Everything I saw had a subtle but unmistakable doubleness. Each pace was reminiscent of some previous pace, not just because I knew the streets well and had walked them before, though this was true, but because I’d already taken that particular pace. My present had somehow gone before me and was already irrevocably in my past. All the sounds I could hear, slightly amplified and somehow picked out or defined, were no more than echoes, their presence freakish, their availability to me as exotic as a radio signal from a long-ago war.

  Each moment, as I lived it, had already been used up. I could not connect things together. They happened to me, they had already happened to me. The helix that spans from birth to death, the unbroken thread of habit and progress that makes a person a person, a self whole and entire, had become as discontinuous and insubstantial as a chain of smoke rings.

  SO THEN IT WAS EVENING and I was cycling down Avenue A, my heart racing, the street treacherous and provisional under my tires. Before or after I saw Leonie and Marc? I could not have said. He crossed in front of me, the old phantom, running as fast as he could into Tompkins Square, chased by a gang of punk kids.

  I dropped my bike and ran after them, swerving past trash and piles of building rubble. Up ahead I saw him fall, his black coat flapping in a momentary gesture of surrender. He curled up as they swarmed him, kicking, punching, beating him down. As I ran up, they scattered, a quick flurry that slowed into a saunter with insolent speed. They didn’t come back for me, just loped away laughing and high-fiving each other. They had patches on their denim jackets: Savage Skulls. I looked down at JumpJim, who lay on the ground groaning and cursing.

  —Little fuckers. Snot-nosed bastards.

  —You’ve been avoiding me.

  When I spoke it seemed to me that I did so without heart or spontaneity, the words ritual, a recitation of some previous speech. I helped the battered old crow to stand and he pressed his hands into his chest and stomach, feeling for damage. A rich meaty smell rose up off him, and I wondered if, like me, he had nowhere to sleep.

  —Why did they do that?

  —Broke my fucking ribs.

  —You need to go to the ER?

  —No, all I want is for you to get me to my front door.

  So I was wrong. He had a place. We limped through some kind of tented encampment, two wretched figures clinging together as we stumbled through the wreckage. Homeless men sat outside shelters patched together from tarpaulin and cardboard. A fire was burning in a trash can. I wondered vaguely what had happened to the dog run, the primary-colored climbing frames and slides in the newly opened playground. When I’d last been in the park it was a cheerful, bustling place. Somehow I had never noticed how many of the buildings in that neighborhood were empty, burned out.

  Secrets are told continuously at the edge of perception. Nothing ever goes away.

  Even injured, JumpJim had a frantic walk, all knees and elbows. From time to time he threw his arms out in a sort of involuntary spasm. People gave us space on the sidewalk. We stopped at a graffiti-covered door, between a bodega and a Chinese takeout.

  —OK, you can leave me here.

  —I need to talk to you.

  —Sorry, but you can see I’m hurt.

  —It’ll only take a minute.

  —I don’t know you, man.

  —Yes you do. It’s about my friend.

  —I don’t know you or your friend. Just be on your way. I need to get to my bed.

  —Carter Wallace. You knew who he was, right? A Wallace. The Wallace Family. You knew how rich he was.

  —Let go my arm.

  —A minute of your time.

  —Just be about your business. I said I don’t know you.

  —I’m going to make you fucking talk to me. You saw him, or he came to see you. About—I don’t know how long ago. Recently.

  —I didn’t see anyone. I make a point of it. I don’t get involved in other people’s business. Look, you’re a witness to what just happened to me. I was the victim of a vicious and unprovoked assault. You ought to show more concern. You’re hurting my arm.

  —I swear I’ll break it.

  —OK, OK. Hold up.

  He looked infinitely old and weary.

  —No need to push me around. You shouldn’t push people around. Sick people. You shouldn’t fucking do that, man.

  Around me the buildings were in flux. The same buildings, not the same. Night had fallen and I was surrounded by a city made only of its cold places, all the basements and alleyways, the airless back rooms.

  —You better come up.

  —My friend Carter got attacked. He’s in a coma.

  —I don’t know anything about that.

  —Really? You don’t know anything at all? He was my best friend. You understand what I’m saying? My best friend.

  —Just come inside the damn building. I’ll talk to you.

  JumpJim pushed at the door, which had no lock. I almost tripped on a broken tile as I stepped inside and as I turned slightly to right myself, I caught a glimpse of the street, the window of a chic-looking patisserie, a woman walking a French bulldog, a scene so cosmically remote from where I was, the dark hallway, the smell of garbage and the closing door, that my mind found the two things impossible to reconcile.

  The door closed. I picked my way up flights of stairs into a fetid red darkness, keeping one hand on the wall and listening to JumpJim’s asthmatic breathing. We groped our way around corners on unlit landings of uncertain size. On one floor I heard Fania salsa filtering under a door, on the next there was a smell of fish and the sound of an argument in what might have been German or Yiddish. The stairs seemed interminable, the plaster of the wall warm and slightly damp to the touch, like the hide of some amphibious beast. Though we were climbing up, I had the illogical sense that I was descending, so that when, at last, I heard him futzing with a key, it felt to me as if I had been swallowed by the city, and was somewhere down in its pulsing, volcanic belly.

  He led me into a stifling apartment filled almost to the ceiling with books and papers. An orange sofa with cigarette burns on the arms, a sticky rug underfoot. Shelves were fitted on every wall, lining the vestibule. Those that weren’t overflowing with books, and the front few inches of those that were, had been filled with small objects arranged in ranks or groups: netsuke, tarot cards, wind-up toys, postcards of freeway rest areas. There were old keys and chopstick rests, painted eggs, swatches of fabric, each collection meticulously arranged, like letters in some high-level language. He had a gas ring, a great humming fridge, some kind of murky bathroom. He’d nailed scarves over the windows. The light was submarine. There was, as far as I could see, no bed. And no records.

  It came to me that I too had been carrying a box of records. I had been carrying Carter’s box of records, careful not to slip. Where had I been taking them?

  —I sold them all years ago, too dangerous.

  He was talking to me. I must have asked him a question.

  —Seventy-eights. I see you scanning the shelves. That’s what you’re looking for. I sold my whole collection. I did keep a few other things. For example, for example. Aha! You’ll find this interesting when it comes.

  He took off his coat and began to rummage through a pile of books.

  —Damn, where is it? You want tea. I can definitely offer you tea, while I’m hunting this out.

  —But you told me you had a rare Willie Brown record.

  —I lied. I don’t have any records. Not a one. Haven’t for years. So do you want tea or not?

  —No.

  I felt spent, as if I’d run some kind of strenuous race and now the only thing left was to come to terms with losing. I slumped down onto the sofa, which exhaled a barely perceptible breath of dust.

  —Just t
ell me about Carter.

  —I really want to find this—ah, here it is!

  He brandished a battered little book, covered in red paper, and began to leaf through it.

  —“Musician. To dream you hear one play foretells grief and sadness. Eight, eleven, eighteen and twenty-three.”

  —What?

  —Those are your numbers. Eight, eleven, eighteen, twenty-three.

  He flipped the cover in my direction. Aunt Sally’s Policy Players’ Dream Book. Some kind of murky woodcut of a woman.

  —At least if you played the numbers, you might win a little something. That’d be a consolation prize, am I right? To tide you over your feelings of grief and loss?

  —This is all a joke to you.

  —No joke, son. All the wisdom of the ancients is between these tattered covers.

  He threw the book onto a pile and flopped down on a metal-framed kitchen chair, gingerly palpating his ribs. I saw that one of his eyes was red. A large bruise was forming below it. I tried to remember whether it had been light outside when they were beating him. I couldn’t hear anything, no street noise, no neighbors. The place was a womb. A rotten womb.

  —I want to know if you met Carter. I think you did. I think you sold your collection to him.

  —You are barking up the wrong tree, son. I sold up years ago, before you or your friend was even born.

  —You’re mixed up in this, whatever is happening here. You know what’s happening.

  —Hold your horses.

  He made a gesture that incensed me, a sort of soothing pianistic fluttering of the fingertips, wafted in my direction. As if he were dispelling me, shooing me back to my place between the pages of his dusty books. I stood up and balled my fist. I told him that if he didn’t stop with the games, I would kill him. He scrambled out of the chair and adopted a fighting stance.