by Jonathan Dee
I rode the subway home. Even under the usual roar you could hear a quiet. Just a bunch of numbed-out people, on a train in a tunnel under the street, letting themselves be rocketed around to wherever they remembered somebody expected them to go.
I got straight online and guess what, fucking Mark Firth’s card was declined, everywhere I tried it. Two possibilities. One, he’d already reported it stolen. Two, it was useless because he’d maxed it out anyway. I wanted to laugh but it didn’t seem that fucking funny.
I took off my shoes and lay on my bed with my hands folded and what I wound up fantasizing about, bizarrely, was the money. All of a sudden I really wanted that shit back, and then some. I wanted punitive damages, I wanted pain and suffering. I wanted the fact that my pain and suffering were obviously fake to be the punitive part.
And then before I knew it the day was gone, and it started to get dark. I guess I was so bored and frustrated that I was in a kind of trance that made the time jump by without my even knowing. I’m sure I slept some too. But mostly I was just in a bad state of mind. I know I meant to call Towles’s office again, just for the hell of it, but somehow I forgot even to do that.
Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to. What a fucked-up world, I thought, that had put me in this spot. I don’t like idleness. It works on me. I think too much. Everything starts to connect. This is what’s gotten me into trouble in the past.
I made another one of those chicken TV dinners. I dicked around online for a while but that just made everything worse, everything I was locked out of. Those sites I like, you knew they hadn’t stopped posting or changed their routine in any way just because some building full of stockbrokers and other assholes fell down somewhere. They were still uploading fresh, new, authentic-as-shit clips every day. And there’s so much of it that things generally only stay up a few days before they’re taken down again, sometimes for legal reasons, most times just to make room for the new. So I was missing things, things I wouldn’t have the opportunity to see ever again. It drove me fucking crazy.
So in the end, I took the big risk, I made the big mistake, I did the one thing that night that’s really fucking self-destructive for me to do. I admit it. I went back out on the roof. Basically I’m the same guy now as I always was: I get worked up and I need to get off somehow in order to settle down again. But I’ve learned to channel it. Thank God for the fucking internet. Because this is how I got into trouble in the first place. You know how long it took me, after last time, to get that job at the lab? Getting caught out on the roof again would put all of that at risk. I’d have nowhere to go but back to Bayside to listen to my mother cry like I’m not sitting right there. Which made it incredibly stupid of me.
But on the other hand, who did I hurt? I mean ever? You think I don’t know how to avoid being seen? It’s like my middle fucking name. And if you don’t see me watching you, if you don’t even know I’m doing it, then what fucking difference does it make to you?
Anyway, if I got caught I figured I could claim post-traumatic stress or whatever. Why should I miss out?
I walked up to the fifth floor—on the outside edge of every step, to cut down on squeaking—and when I tried the roof door it was open, just like it always was back when, just like the old super hadn’t been fired for not locking it. In the middle of the roof there’s an exhaust vent, and I walked across the tarpaper as quickly as I could and flattened myself against it. If you make a sort of tight circle around it, you can see through windows in a total of five other buildings. One is some Columbia housing, like fifteen stories. The lower-floor windows especially are so close you could almost reach out and open them, but people leave their lights on, their blinds up, they don’t have a clue. I used to see people every night. There was a high school girl in the high-rise, she was the best, my downfall in fact, though she was probably long gone by now. Couples fucking, mostly in a really boring way but still, when it is on the real it is always oh so stimulating no matter what they look like. Other guys beating off too, sometimes, which doesn’t exactly do it for me—but then also, this one woman who used to sit on the couch in front of her TV and just rub one out with a dildo or a vibrator or something, damned if I could see. That was the absolute best. I would have given anything to be able to hear her, but there’s always a lot of noise rising up from the street and she was too far away.
I made a circle around the vent, looking in every lit window, feeling my heart pound even worse than I remembered. Then another circle, and another one. Then I just stepped away and stood in the middle of the roof, on top of my building, under the stars. I couldn’t believe it. There was nothing out there. Everyone—everyone—was just watching their fucking TVs, and on every TV was the same thing, like the whole city was the window of an appliance store or something. Shadows of people’s heads in front of the TV news. I just stood there and stared. I saw a new light go on and some nice-looking chick in a t-shirt and shorts, but then she just sat at her kitchen table not moving, and I realized she just couldn’t sleep, that was all it was. How long was this shit going to go on? When were people going to drop it and go back to acting like nobody was watching them? They were all still alive. They were all still their own nasty selves. They’d forget, because that’s what people do, they forget what they feel. They go back to being animals. They go back to being savages.
Monday I went back to the lab, and I’ve never been so happy to go to work in my life. I was twenty minutes early. “You okay?” everybody kept asking me, and I got paranoid I looked sick or something, until I saw they were asking everybody that, first thing. “You okay?” Jesus, yes, I’m fine. Enough.
Then Yuri saw me, and I tried to act cool, but he just smirked. That shit never works with Yuri. “Somebody looks a little tired,” he said with his dumbass accent. “I tell you what. Meet me in the break room at ten forty-five. Uncle Yuri is feeling generous, in this time of national mourning.”
“Not you too,” I said.
He clapped me on the shoulder, then he leaned over and I thought for a second he was going to kiss me on the cheek. He puts his lips almost against my ear. “Fuck these people,” he whispers very softly to me. “Fuck this whole country in its big fat ass.”
The end of that same week, I’m on my break at work and I see I’ve missed a call from Towles. “You’re back,” I say when I finally get through to him. “You know, I came looking for you. I’m not the one who missed our meeting.”
“So I heard.”
“So now I have to get another day off, but when do you want to do this?”
“We have a problem,” he says. “Not with the suit, which will go forward. With you as one of the name plaintiffs. You’re in the registry. I don’t know why you didn’t tell me that, though I also can’t fathom why my staff didn’t turn it up before now. Anyway, you can understand that this is not what we want, public-image-wise.”
I was seething, for a minute. But he explained to me that I’m still part of the whole class action, I’ll still get my money back if he wins. This just keeps my name out of it. Cool with me. Just as soon keep my name to myself anyway.
Maybe two weeks later, maybe less, I’m in the Morningside Heights post office again. I’ve got my envelope and my registered-mail form all filled out. It’s quiet in there. And crowded, twenty people at least waiting in line, in spite of which only two of the ten windows are open. You can see other employees walking around back there, of course, doing fuck-all, talking to each other, scratching their asses. But God forbid any of them should speed things up for us by opening a third window. Probably against union rules, right? We’re all staring at that light with the green arrow on it, waiting for the little bell. It’s like hell on earth in there. But nobody says anything. Then a woman leaves the second window, the guy at the head of the line—some older guy wearing a suit and sneakers, bald on top but with this scraggly white Bozo hair around the sides—starts forward with his package, but instead of the light going on, the woman behind the co
unter puts up her NEXT WINDOW PLEASE sign and gets up and walks away.
You can kind of feel the air go out of everybody in line. But then the guy in the suit, halfway between the front of the line he’s just left and the shuttered window, says out loud, “Are you kidding me?” Maybe it wasn’t that loud, but it sounded loud.
Nobody made eye contact with him.
“Are you kidding me right now?” he says.
And then he just goes off! He drops his package on the counter and he starts banging on the window, pounding on it. “Hey!” he says. “Hey! I see you back there! I can see all of you! Can’t you see us? What is wrong with you people?”
The woman behind the one remaining open window all of a sudden shuts hers too, and disappears. Now it’s ten closed windows. Like war.
“Is this any way to run a goddamn business?” the guy yells. His face is dark red. He turns to look at us, but no one will meet his eye. “You disrespectful government vermin! I demand that you open up these windows right now! I’ve lived in this neighborhood for twenty-eight years! I will not be treated this way! None of us will! Come out of there, you coward, you lazy fucking bitch!”
They had to call security. Two of them, it took. He was still yelling when they dragged him out to the street. Jesus, it was beautiful. Some woman in line accused me of laughing, but I wasn’t, I swear. I just felt this huge sense of relief. There we go, I thought. Thank God. Finally!
The lazy, nearly empty train ride north to the end of the line, the long, featureless ditches and bright foliage, the towns diminishing in size and vitality—White Plains, Valhalla, Katonah—all of which looked like ghost towns now, though maybe they’d looked the same a few days ago, before the air of loss had attached itself to everything. Mark was one of just three passengers in his train car. At Brewster came the transfer onto a much smaller train—a Budd car, it was called: the term popped back into his head from boyhood, when he was obsessed with such things—and there he found himself the only passenger at all. He leaned his forehead against the scratched plastic window and watched the trees flow by, lifting his gaze only when the conductor came to ask softly, almost apologetically, for his ticket.
“Thought there might be more people getting out of the city,” Mark said.
The conductor, a man about Mark’s age who wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie with a clip, expelled air through his nose. “Need to bomb those people flat, is what we need to do,” he said.
They seemed to be talking about different people, but the misunderstanding wasn’t worth pursuing. Mark passed him the return portion of the round-trip ticket, purchased Monday, and saw him linger over the date on it.
“Get home safe,” the conductor said. Mark mouthed, “You too.”
Old towns, colonial towns, towns too far north to posit themselves as suburbs. Rusted swing sets and above-ground pools in backyards perpendicular to the tracks. He felt like one of those nineteenth-century robber barons with his own private rail car, except for a lot of things, principally the absence of food and the faint mildew smell and the deep cracks in the vinyl upholstery of his and most every seat and the faint, permanent stains on the murky industrial linoleum of the floor. Mark couldn’t think offhand where you might go to replace that grade of linoleum anymore. It had to be as old as the car itself.
Why was there no one else on the train? Maybe because you were now supposed to think of mass transit as a target. It was pretty hard to consider this particular train, which ran in a straight line away from New York City for two and a half hours and then just stopped in the middle of nowhere as if due to an expiration of interest, an asset worth the resentful or strategic notice of anyone anywhere. But danger and ill will were loose in the world, anarchic and unreasonable. He could see the back of the neck of his conductor, sitting in the front seat of the car with his hat on, gazing straight ahead, at attention, Mark imagined.
In the parking lot in Wassaic he found his truck—Karen wasn’t comfortable driving it, so he hadn’t wanted to leave her without the Escort for a few days—and continued north up 22, through the valleys of stony farmland, cows standing dumbly on the slopes. In Hillsdale he turned east on 23 and crossed the state line. He’d told Karen what train he was taking just before he left the hotel. He was low on gas but he didn’t want to stop, and anyway his credit card was missing; he thought maybe he’d left it with the front desk, for incidentals, when he checked in to the hotel. He didn’t specifically remember doing that, but then he barely remembered Monday at all. In Howland, just a mile from home, he was suddenly nervous at the two stop signs he had to observe; he didn’t want anyone to see him, or even the telltale truck with his name on the side. They’d make a fuss. He’d been touched but mostly embarrassed by Karen’s report of friends and neighbors and even people he’d never liked very much standing on the Town Hall steps holding candles and praying for him. “Well, technically, you are a survivor,” she’d said. “It can be looked at that way. Anyway, you just put a face on the whole thing for everybody, that’s all. Otherwise it’s so massive people don’t even know how to pray about it, what to ask for.”
“But it’s just so random that I’m here at all,” Mark had said.
“It was random for everybody. Right? It was just as random for the people who were killed. It’s not like a bunch of soldiers dying. Just a bunch of people going to work. But those people are heroes now.”
Were they heroes? He guessed they were. You could become a hero without doing anything, if your end turned out to mean something to others. Anyway, he could certainly admit now, to himself at least, how frightened he’d been. He took the last bend before his turnoff and another car, one he didn’t recognize, honked as it passed him going the other way. Mark flinched and waved at his own rearview mirror, and then swung left onto the dirt road that led to his driveway.
The house was a perfect old New England saltbox that had been added onto once, in a less than sensitive fashion, long before they ever saw it. His initial plan was to restore it properly himself, maybe even tear the addition down, but in those early days of the marriage Karen had encouraged him to save his time and skills for paying work. Every winter they closed off part of it to save on heat and still had rooms to spare. They’d taken on so much more space than they needed, mostly because the house was an unmissable bargain; he’d been tipped off to its foreclosure by his brother Gerry, a real estate agent in Stockbridge, who’d had a girlfriend of sorts who worked at Citizens Bank. Mark bought it at auction, on a Wednesday morning in midwinter, for what he had to keep reminding himself was practically nothing. Gerry’s advice was to fix it up a bit and flip it, and that too was the plan for a while, but then Haley was born, and Mark’s business picked up, and he started to feel the sentimental pull of the idea of a house that his children and their own families would want to return to on holidays, on summer weekends, that they could eventually inherit from him. Interested as he was in making money generally, he wanted his home to be a home, not an investment, not an asset to convert at the top of the market. Of course, they could have used the cash right now. But in his heart it was still out of the question, and Karen hadn’t brought it up in a while.
Where the driveway turned into lawn, Mark stopped and switched off the truck. His heart was pounding. Even though there was no sign of the Escort, he hit the horn twice. No one came through the door. He checked his watch: Karen must have gone to pick up Haley at school, which had resumed today. Fair enough, he thought: she couldn’t very well make Haley wait, just in order to stay there for him. Still, the silence of the house, the fact that his wife and daughter were gone, put an irrational lump in his throat that made him think the trauma of the last few days had worked on him more than he realized. He stood in front of his truck and listened. Nothing but a breeze moving the ryegrass at the point where the mowing line ended. When they’d bought the place, it was utterly private—two point seven acres, and you couldn’t see another house in any direction, on either side of the road, which
was just the way Mark liked it. Unfortunately, that had changed. About four years later, when Haley was two, a gap had appeared almost overnight in the stand of trees to the east of them, across the ryegrass meadow, maybe five hundred yards away; the gap turned into a square clearing, then a hole, into which a foundation was poured, by which time Mark had the whole story. The house was going up at the behest of somebody from New York City named Philip Hadi, a Wall Street guy, like so many of them up here. He’d rented in Howland with his family for two weeks the previous July and, based solely on that, had decided to build a home here. That kind of financial spontaneity seemed to Mark both reckless and enviable. He had expected the worst, of course—some ostentatious zillionaire, building on a whim—but in the end the design fit in decently, and the house, while plenty big, was not monstrous. Karen was angry that their view was marred. But this was how towns like theirs survived, like it or not—people who grew up here usually tried their damnedest to get out, and outsiders and their money had to be attracted and accommodated. And anyway, the Hadi house was only occupied two or three months out of the year. From September to June, it was unlit, and on a moonless night you couldn’t see it out there any more than you could make out anything else.
Haley’s elementary school was ten minutes away, so Mark could easily have waited. But the need to see them, to hold them, was now overwhelming him. Without even dropping his suitcase on the porch he got back in the truck and drove to school; he didn’t make it halfway across the parking lot before people started shouting to Karen that he was here, and then, in front of many of their friends and neighbors, he was treated to the homecoming, his daughter followed by his wife reaching him on the dead run across the concrete like he was a POW on an airport tarmac. A few people cheered. He and Karen kissed several times in a loving way that respected the presence of their audience, which now included ten or twelve second graders. For Haley everything was back to normal in an instant, so much so that she chose to ride home in the Escort with her mother, while Mark followed. She never liked riding in the truck; she said it was too noisy.
