What Comes Next

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “OK,” he said. The car, barely moving, stuttered past another exit. The nose of the car melting in the heat, the streets like tar pools. The smell of carrion fish in the air, the rubbery smell of burning flesh. Parks humming to himself, the traffic barely moving.

  “Can you smell it?” he said. “Take a deep breath. I was born a few minutes from the shore in Connecticut; my mother swam in the ocean up to a week before my birth. We moved to Hartford when I was five, but in my blood this is my home.” Gesturing with his head. “This is my turf, my home.” He took his hands from the wheel and extended them over his head like a victorious prizefighter.

  “I don’t want to go to Coney Island,” the other said.

  The car swerved slightly, veered toward the middle lane—Parks, his foot like a piston, slammed on the brakes. He was thrown forward, his head against the metal of the glove compartment.

  He didn’t say anything, rubbing his head. Swollen like a thumb. Parks grinning like the horse in his living room. Glancing at his student when he thought he wasn’t looking.

  “I’ve been fairly decent to you, haven’t I? When you needed a place to stay, I put you up, didn’t I?”

  “I never said you didn’t.”

  “I did more for you than any teacher of mine ever did for me.

  He said he would repay him when he got the chance.

  He said he had already been repaid.

  There had been an accident. Some foreign car had gone into the guard railing, the front flattened in like the cat in a cartoon. A man, blood on the back of his head, slumped over the wheel. A bored-looking cop waved them on.

  Christopher handed him his orders, a subway token Scotch-taped to the top.

  Parks, reading, smiled like a child. “On my birthday. How do you like that?”

  Absently, he put the letter in his shirt pocket. Christopher held out his hand. Parks returned the orders. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “What are you going to do? Nothing, I suppose. Go in like a sheep and get slaughtered. Or kill others, which wouldn’t bother you much, would it?”

  “Would it bother you?”

  The traffic had thinned out after the accident.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I went AWOL? It’s something I think would interest you.” He didn’t wait for an answer.

  “I couldn’t get a pass,” he said. “The company, for some reason I forget, had been restricted to post for a week. And I wanted to see this girl who was staying at a motel about ten miles from the fort. It was a calculated risk since I was supposed to be on guard duty that night and had gotten someone at a price to stand in for me.”

  They had reached Coney Island. Parks talking about how his fear of being caught had ruined things for him with the girl.

  Did he want him to go and do it for him?

  Then he had the feeling that this was someone else, not Parks. Someone who looked incredibly like him.

  The salt spray like damp particles of sand in the air, like the nubby surface of a fish. Parks’ voice floating in and above a Beatles song. “… live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine. We all five …”

  Diving into the waves. The water clamping him into itself. Pulling him down. He couldn’t get up. Panicked. Drowned. Came up. The air like pins filling the spaces of his chest. After that he was afraid to go under again.

  For moments, it was all he remembered of his life. A small fish sticking like a bone in his throat.

  “She had great sloping thighs, a cavernous woman, a veritable cave of flesh. In my dreams, I wallowed in her like a great hog. What monstrously sexy thighs! You can’t imagine. An earth mother who could disembowel you by the root. A woman of means. Everything about her was carnal—teeth, breasts, thighs. A great steamy cavern between her legs. A hidden continent. You can’t imagine. And for all I had imagined, when I was with her, absent without leave, I couldn’t get my bone to the sticking place.”

  They pulled into a makeshift-looking parking lot at the dead end of Coney Island. Eight cars in the whole lot—theirs the ninth. (The water there, for some reason, not good for swimming—more polluted than the rest.) A few looked immovable, camouflaged by heavy layers of dust as if they had been in the same spot for years. The attendant, an old Negro, asleep on a wooden chair in front of a small yellow shack. All the time Parks (or his double) telling his story, Christopher taking notes in his head.

  They walked toward the boardwalk, toward the ocean.

  A girl about fourteen, with an accent, asked if they’d like to make a sandwich.

  “Take off your shoes and socks,” Parks said, making it sound like an order. Sitting down on the damp sand under the boardwalk to remove his own. He did as Parks did.

  “How is it the sand doesn’t hurt your feet?” he said. Parks running on his toes. On the sides of his feet.

  “I don’t think about it.”

  The sand is cool where the tide, which has now gone out, has washed over it. They walk on the damp sand along the ocean’s edge, over fragments of sea shells, braids of seaweed, used condoms, unborn fish.

  “I couldn’t get her out of my head, those great thick tunnels of thigh—a scar on her belly where something was removed—so I went off the fort again without a pass to see her. Absent without leave. No one covering for me. The danger greater than before.”

  Parks rolled up his pants legs to the knees. Holding his shoes in front of him, he waded ankle deep into the ocean like some exotic bird. The foam rushing across his legs, trembling them.

  He followed suit. The beach they were on almost deserted. A few people swimming far out beyond the breakers. Some drops of rain. A man carrying a child on his shoulders came out of the water about ten feet ahead, went by.

  “When I finally made it with her, I couldn’t get enough. She was amazing. Her flesh consumed me, swallowed me up, her great hips and thighs. I was like a cannon going off in that voluminous forest of flesh. I was like a supercharged cannon. Ignited by her. Without the will to stop. It was like a descent into hell.”

  They walk along the water, up to their knees in it, Parks on the inside, a step farther in, talking. Talking. There is no one near them.

  “I kept expecting something to go wrong, someone to give me away, some punishment for what I had done. It became clear after a while that no one cared whether I had been AWOL or not. No one gave a damn. No one wanted to know. It was painful to get away with so much. Ruined my pleasure in the end.”

  His words like drilling on a Novocained tooth. Parks, talking about provoking a fight with an officer, a fist fight in a bar, tosses his shoes on the dry sand. While the other has his hands full, he punches him in the side of the head.

  Christopher stumbles, throws his shoes toward the shore. “I thought you don’t believe in fighting.” His hands at his sides.

  “For taking advantage of me in my absence,” he says. “For screwing my wife.”

  He backs up, takes another punch. Backing up. The water deeper, making it harder to retreat. Hunched forward, Parks stalks him. He slips in the water, comes up with a handful of mud, which he flings at him. Parks spits mud, cursing. His face and shirt spattered.

  “You did it to get at me. I trusted you like a son.”

  “I did it for you.”

  “Contemptible bastard.” He is murderously angry. They wrestle. Christopher gets free and moves out of his reach.

  “What do you mean, you did it for me?” Parks’ eyes afraid of being seen, strangers to the window they look out of. Spies. “I didn’t want anything like that. What do you think I am?”

  He was dangerous. He decided to kill him.

  As if reading his mind, Parks takes a step back. The water lapping the edges of his rolled־up pants. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” he says. “It’s better now that we’ve had it out.” He holds out his hand.

  “That’s right.”

  He turns his head, stares out
at the ocean. The mud stains on his shirt like wounds. “I feel better now.”

  Turning his head to follow the direction of his stare, seeing ocean on ocean on ocean. The sun at the farthest point resting on the water, sinking. He watches the sun burn into the water—the ocean on fire. An enormous wave breaks in the near distance and he watches it coming down on him.

  They are waiting for his signal. The sex maniacs, the Communists, the protesters, the police, the bombers. He goes over on his side into the fire.

  How clear it is underneath. The man’s legs are stilts. He snaps them loose and watches him tumble like a cripple. Pulling him into the deeper water, his arm around his neck. The undertow stronger than either of them, but then he becomes the tow himself. The man tries to lift his head but the tow is too strong for him and brings him to the bottom. His face like a blowfish. He is saying something. Echoes of sound. Have to pay. Couldn’t stop. Father. Me. Failed. Love me. Fighting. The end. Stop. He turns him over and presses his face into the clay. He presses down until he enters the clay, becomes black like the bottom. His arms out. He is dark now.

  “Peace,” Christopher says.

  It is possible to breathe under the water. There is no longer any reason to worry. My father floats by at the head of a school of fish.

  Someone calls my name.

  Bells are tolling. Fully dressed except for shoes and socks. Late for an appointment, my pants like a balloon. Whooooooooooooooo.

  “This is my son,” he says. “I am well pleased with him.”

  God, it is an agony to rise.

  On my hands and knees. The lifeguard is there, others. A crowd. “Are you alive?” someone asks.

  They have to fight to hold me down. Someone sitting on my back, beating water out of my lungs.

  They help me up. The sky all sun now, blazing, luminous, flickering like jewels off the water. There is no sign of my shoes. No sign of Parks. He was the noblest of them all. The sand feels like ice.

  They insist I sit on a wet bench in the first-aid hutch. A child of about four or five sits next to me, crying for his mother. Everyone finds his mother, I tell him.

  “Where’s his mother?”

  No one knows.

  “Do you know where you live?” I ask him, wanting to sleep.

  He nods, says something I can’t understand.

  A policeman pats the boy on the head (I am laughing), asks me what my story is. Goes away before I can answer. Someone calling him, another cop.

  A wave passes through me. I close my eyes. The sun in my throat like a ball. When I stand, my legs are gone.

  “We’re getting you some dry clothes,” he tells me. “And you don’t worry,” he says to the kid, who is no longer crying.

  “My name is Christopher Steiner.” No one hears. My story is …

  I walk away. Steiner. The police have their backs to me. Walk slowly away as if I’m not going anywhere. They will hear of me.

  Someone is following. I have a sense of it, but don’t look behind (I’m Christopher Steiner), keep walking, then break into a run. There can be no peace without freedom. Feeling sick, I hold on to the wire fence of a miniature golf course. MINNIE’S ATOMIC MINI-GOLF—A FUN TIME FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY. There are no players. The nausea comes and goes in waves. I feel what it must feel to be an old man.

  There is a kid standing next to me. Looking at me as if I owe him something. The same kid as before.

  “It’s not polite to follow people, son.”

  He looks at me dumbly, hands me a sweaty piece of paper.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  My name is Bartholomew Doyle.

  I live at 105 Avenue M..

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bartdoyle,” he says as if it’s one word.

  “I’m Christopher Steiner. I’m going to take you home. OK?”

  “Let’s see your police.” He giggles, looks around, punches me in the side. “Are you his daddy?”

  Whose? I wave at a taxi, which comes over at my signal. Bart climbs in, making machine-gun noises.

  I look at my watch, which has pustules of water trapped under its eye. Very late. A flaming bottle hits the door of the cab. Machine-gun fire in the street. Someone running is hit. Keeps running. Three holes in his back. Falls. Since thinking about what will happen will do no good, close my eyes.

  Curtis Parks is the first casualty of what is a new stage in the quest for peace. There can be no peace without war.

  My father was about to beat Phyllis with his belt for having married out of the family. I jumped on him from behind and wrestled the belt loose. The two of us coming apart on opposite sides of the room. “I’m dying,” he said, picking up a chair to heave at me. Rosemary was standing between us. “There’s no need to fight,” she said. “I love you both.”

  He dropped the chair, put his hands over his face.

  “One eighty,” the driver says, “and you’re a free man.” I peel apart two wet dollars. Bart is already at the door to his house.

  “I just killed one of the enemy,” I tell him. He smiles and makes a machine-gun noise in his teeth. “Ehhehhehhehhehh-ehh.”

  It cracks me up. I feel like dancing in the street.

  His grandmother offers me a glass of cherry soda. Tells me that Bart’s mother and father are separated. His mother is absentminded, has lost Bart before. “If it weren’t for my husband’s family, those people sick all the time—always someone dying—we would never have left Indianapolis.”

  “He’s going to grow up to be a good kid,” I say.

  Bart sitting on my lap. His grandmother talking about how much better it was before they came to New York. “Too many foreigners in New York is the trouble.”

  “You have a friend here waiting for you,” my mother says. “I didn’t know what to tell her—you didn’t give us a time.”

  “I won’t be home until it’s over.”

  “We’re proud, son. Whatever you have to do, our hearts are with you.”

  The grandmother lends me twenty cents, which I cannot promise to return. I return the glass of cherry soda to her half finished. Bart punches me good-bye.

  I run the three blocks to the elevated, hearing the train in the distance, thinking I can make it if I hurry.

  There are several planes flying directly overhead, bombers, a squadron of eagles. I feel their shadow across my back as I run. People move out of my way. An ambulance siren somewhere. The sound of big guns in the distance. The shelling recurs at fifteen-second intervals. Craters in the ground. Have to get through to someone. Get the word to headquarters. It was not expected of him, they will say. Nothing hurts anymore but memory. Parks killed in action. Others. A handful still left. Holding them off. The street on fire.

  A dying man hands me a revolver. I go up the gray iron steps, thinking of Rosemary’s breasts (someday she will hear of me), gunning her enemy as they rise, two steps at a time, until, leg-weary, teetering, floating, I reach the top of the station. As I make my move, I hear the last train rumbling in. Knowing if I can get through in time there is hope. I take off like an astronaut, the countdown still ticking in his head, taking off. Fight fire with fire, my orders say. Fighting weariness, fears, doubts (“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the sound track), telling myself there’s no more to go this time, no more, no more, no more, I go up the final flight of stairs. It is three steps at a time this time, the final flight. There is no more to go after this.

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