Pariah

by Bob Fingerman

  “Waste not, want not” went the old saw.

  When he returned to the living room, which he used as his studio, Ellen was lying on the floor, eyes closed. At first Alan thought all that death talk finished her off, but he saw her rib cage rise with each soundless breath. Had she fainted?

  “Ellen?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Want something to eat?”

  Ellen propped herself up and nodded, looking dreamy. Looking spaced out. She remained seated on the floor as she accepted the dish of beans and they ate in silence, slowly. No one wolfed down food but the zombies anymore. When they’d finished cleaning their plates, Alan took them back into the kitchen. Washing up was a thing of the past. He wiped the plates with the hem of his shorts. That was as good as it got, cleanliness-wise. Take that, Board of Health.

  When he returned, Ellen was on his couch with her back to him, nude, her body arranged in an undernourished homage to the classic Ingres canvas, “Grande Odalisque.” She’d even wrapped a towel around her head and held a flyswatter where Ingres’s model held a feathered fan.

  “Want to immortalize something alive?” she asked. “Barely, but still.”

  Alan thought about the drawing of her he’d inadequately disposed of and his malignant arrangement with Eddie. If only he’d burned it. This wasn’t about the drawing, anyway. It was about protecting Ellen from Eddie’s vicious gossip. And was Ellen ready to see a truthful depiction of herself? That was the bigger issue. Alan had tossed away that drawing because he thought it would hurt her. How should he proceed? Whenever he’d done portraits of, let’s say, aesthetically challenged people he knew, he always embellished a little, flattered where possible while maintaining sufficient fealty to the model. He’d hand over the art and the subject always seemed pleased. But Ellen, damaged as she was, would likely see through such a chivalrous ruse. Better just to portray what was.

  “Okay,” Alan said, picking a pad and terra-cotta Conté crayon off the floor.

  “Don’t you want to paint me?” Ellen asked.

  “Uh. A drawing would be quicker.”

  “You have someplace else you need to be?”

  “Good point.”

  Alan opened his paint box, a sturdy wooden one that had belonged to his grandfather. He kept his brushes bristle up in a mason jar nearby and selected a hogs hair filbert and a hogs hair round to lay in the basic structure in thinned burnt sienna. He already had a primed canvas stapled to a lapboard. Proper stretchers were a sweet memory. The canvas, with its dry bluish-gray layer of wash, was on the smallish side but would have to do, like everything else in short supply. Alan never wanted to be a miniaturist, but so be it.

  As Alan sketched Ellen’s basic form in small but confident strokes, he really studied her body. It was about 10:30 in the morning; the light in the room was somewhat diffuse as the sun was still at the east end of the apartment. By the time the sun hung over York, casting direct light into the room, he had the basic form blocked in. The light would be strong for a couple of hours. As the illumination grew stronger, so did the highlights on Ellen’s body, sweat glinting on each raised vertebra, each dorsal rib, her raised hipbone. Though emaciated, the essence of her former loveliness was still evident. Lighting made such a difference. Maybe this painting could be both flattering and honest.

  “Can I have a glass of water?” Ellen asked, breaking what Alan realized had been several hours of total silence.

  14

  “Ooh! Ooh! There, across the street. Something’s happening over there at the Food City! I saw somebody go into the market. Someone’s stealing our food. Well, not our food, but you know what I mean!”

  “It was bound to happen,” Ruth said.

  “What? A food thief? You bet your sweet bippy! I keep vigil, nothing gets past me!”

  “No, no, no, not the alleged food thief.”

  “Alleged? Then what? What? What was bound to happen?” Abe turned away from his post at the window and glared at his wife.

  “Losing your marbles. Senility. Dementia. Whatever you want to call it. You spend all day staring out the window and you’re bound to start seeing things.”

  “I’m not seeing things,” Abe sputtered.

  “Exactly. You’re not seeing things because there’s nothing to see. Like the lights in the sky the other night.”

  “Not the sky, the ground.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There was some kind of fracas.”

  “Fracas,” Ruth repeated.

  “A brouhaha.”

  Ruth just stared, her mouth pursed. Abe dabbed his sweaty forehead, wiping a trickle of stinging saltiness from the corner of his eye. He blinked a few times and looked back out the window. Nothing was any different than usual. The host of rotting cabbages was muddling en masse in perfect, unbroken harmony.

  “I just thought I saw . . . Ah, nuts.”

  Abe looked again, his eye drifting to Food City.

  “Aha!” he shouted. “Aha! There!” He pointed at the doors, the glass of one was broken. “There! The door’s busted. I heard that. I heard a crash. So there!”

  “So?” Ruth said, unmoved. “They broke a window. Wonderful. In addition to eating us they’re vandals now. I’m thrilled. And now the supermarket’s full of them. I can see why you’re cheering.”

  “They just mill around,” Abe said. “They don’t break windows.”

  “They did,” Ruth said.

  “I don’t think so,” Abe said.

  But didn’t know if he believed it.

  “I wish I had me a gun,” Dabney said as he lobbed a half brick from his perch. “And bullets,” he added. “Lots of bullets. I don’t want this to be one of them tricky ‘Monkey’s Paw’ wishes where you get a little of this but none of that and it works out bad. A gun and lotsa bullets and maybe a scope for aiming. This brick throwing shit’s all well and good if you’re a fucking caveman, but damn.”

  Karl, who had risked Dabney’s scorn and come up to the roof, sat nearby, handing chunks to Dabney, like an old-time cannoneer supplying his gunner. He’d mind his p’s and q’s today. No repetitions of the “Mean Joe Green” incident, as he’d come to think of it.

  “Another thing would be nice about having a scope would be I could really see the damage I inflicted,” Dabney continued. “From up here it’s too small. I wanna see the heads pop. I wanna see the chunks spatter up, the bits of bone and brain. I wanna know that I’ve put ’em down for good. Sometimes I think I see ’em get up again and there’s no way I can hit the same ones twice. I don’t have that kind of aim, least not freehand. But with a nice rifle? Shit, heads would be poppin’, son.”

  “Yeah, that’d be cool.”

  “You humoring me?”

  “No. I think it would be totally cool.”

  Karl didn’t think it was that cool, but why make waves? Rifles and scopes reminded him too much of Big Manfred, who’d been as devout a hunter as he’d been a Christian. “Hey, Bambi, have a little of this,” had been his oft-repeated jibe when “thinning the herd.” “Hunting whitetail” sounded like one of the triple-X titles Karl had yearned to see on the marquees of the Deuce, but he’d kept that to himself. Big Manfred wouldn’t have seen the humor. The same went for “buck fever,” which sounded like gay porn. Big Manfred definitely wouldn’t have found that the least bit amusing. Guns. Bullets. A scope. The truth is, Karl thought if you’re going to make a wish, why not just wish none of this had ever happened in the first place?

  Dabney lofted another hunk into the crowd and it dropped between bodies. He clucked in disapproval, then turned away from the cornice, massaging his bicep, sweat spilling off him. Above, the sky was clear and bright and in other circumstances would be lovely to behold. Dabney lay on his back on the tarp and closed his eyes, shielding them with a large hand, wishing for rain. The clouds that roved the sky from time to time were a sadistic tease. Karl studied the older—but not old—man. He was still, in relative terms, beefy. When Dabney had shown up he�
�d weighed in at close to three hundred pounds so even now he looked formidable.

  Karl’s attention drifted over to Dabney’s smokehouse. Was there still meat inside? Karl wondered if he should ask. Didn’t he deserve a second chance? Could he risk sneaking up when Dabney was asleep? No, that would be a bad idea. Lined up along the low wall on the southern side of the roof were Ruth’s flowerboxes. With seeds she’d collected from the last fresh vegetables—cucumbers, green peppers, peas, and tomatoes—she’d attempted to grow food for the building; a noble effort that never made it. Small spindly tendrils had poked out of the soil, but the lack of rain and the oppressive heat baked them before they’d blossomed.

  Dabney rolled back onto his belly, then hoisted himself to his knees, crawled to the edge of the roof and looked straight down.

  “You know how frustrating it is looking down there every day and seeing the top of my truck taunting me?” Dabney said. “Every day. Least those motherfuckers could do is turn it over, but they got no strength it seems. Just numbers. Turn it all the way over, onto its back like a turtle. Then I wouldn’t see it no more.”

  Jutting out into the street at a forty-five degree angle languished the van Dabney had plowed into the building seven months earlier. Painted on the pale blue roof in black was the legend, DABNEY LOCKSMITH & ALARM, then smaller, SERVING ALL FIVE BOROUGHS SINCE 1979, followed by his phone number in really big purple numerals. The front end was crumpled, the small hood popped open, revealing a blackened engine block. The back doors hung open, jostled every few moments by figures that passed by or through them. No doubt sun-shy zombies squatted within.

  “It mocks me. Reminds me I didn’t make it home.”

  “Home is where the heart is,” Karl ventured.

  “You say some stupid-ass nonsense, son,” Dabney said, but he was smiling.

  “I know.”

  “My van and that goddamn supermarket. Ain’t that a bitch?”

  “Yup.”

  Eddie and Dave, back when they’d been brawny, had hoisted Dabney from the roof of his van as the zombies groped for him. It was the first and last altruistic act either of them had committed, and even then, Eddie had needed lots of persuasion. “That nigger’ll just eat all our food,” he’d complained. “I mean look at him. He’s a fuckin’ house. He’ll probably rape all the women, even the old bitch. Niggers don’t care, man. Pussy is pussy to their kind.” The old “project your sin onto others and disparage them for it” routine. Talk about calling the kettle black. Ever since the rescue, Dabney was merely “that nigger on the roof,” as far as Eddie was concerned, though he’d never have the temerity to utter those words within earshot of Dabney, lest he end up pitched down to the congregation as a tasty morsel. Not that Karl would object. Eddie was every jock asshole that’d terrorized Karl over the years, all rolled into one.

  He reminded Karl of his dear old papa.

  Big Manfred was a sportsman.

  Big Manfred was a bigot.

  Big Manfred hated almost everything Karl held dear.

  “I miss my music,” Karl squawked.

  “Where’d that come from?” Dabney turned from his perch and looked at the slight young man. This normally placid little white boy was shivering with agitation, eyes popped wide and despairing. The right corner of his mouth was twitching.

  “What kind of life is this? What are we doing with ourselves? We’re biding our time until we just shrivel up and die!” Karl’s voice was stretched almost as thin as his small body, but there was vitality in his anguish. He sprang up and, fists clenched at his sides, glared up at the sky. “What is this? What the fuck is this?” He waved his arms around, gesticulating at nothing and everything. “What? What? What is this? What is the point? What’s the fucking point?”

  He began to hyperventilate.

  Dabney rose and stepped toward him, unsure of what to do. Talk to him? Tackle him? Give him a hug? Karl’s face was pulled taut, like his skull was trying to escape its fragile prison of skin and muscle. Dabney reached out and Karl slapped away his hand, then punched Dabney in the mouth.

  The force of the blow surprised them both.

  Karl sidestepped Dabney and walked in measured, deliberate steps up the rise toward the edge. Dabney massaged his jaw and watched. He wasn’t mad at Karl. If anything, he was a bit spooked by the sudden change in his visitor. Karl stood right on the lip of the drop and stared straight ahead.

  “Are you happy?” he asked the air in front of him. If the question was meant for Dabney, it didn’t sound that way. “I’m not.”

  “No one’s happy, son. Listen, Karl, step away from there. I mean toward me. Back away from there. Not forward. Don’t jump.”

  “Don’t jump.”

  “Right. Don’t jump.”

  “You ever see that old cop show, Dragnet? Or any old cop show, for that matter? There always was an episode where some kid would try LSD, or sometimes even just pot, and he’d be up on the roof of the local high school or church or wherever. He’d be some square from Central Casting’s notion of a hippie or beatnik. Or sometimes he or she would be ‘the good kid who’s fallen in with the bad crowd.’ And there this twenty-five-year-old high school student would be, saying things like, ‘I can fly, man. I can fly. I just know I can,’ and Joe Friday or some other stiff in a fedora and skinny tie would be trying to talk the kid down, but not off the roof. ‘Don’t do it, son, you’re having a bad trip.’ Yeah.

  “I don’t want to jump. I don’t want to fall. My balance is fine. I used to play games like this as a kid. I’d pretend that I was way up high, only I’d be down on the sidewalk, walking along the thin edge of the curb. If a breeze came and unsettled my balance, if my footing got away from me and I dropped to the asphalt, in my mind I’d fallen into a bottomless chasm. There’s no breeze. I’m challenging God to knock me off this roof. Bring a wind. Sweep me away. I’m not worried. My dad always said ‘God is in the details,’ and I believe that. Because look at this world of ours. Seems like God’s missing the big picture, don’t you think?”

  “I thought it was ‘The devil is in the details.’ ”

  “No. That’s wrong. That’s a variation. What’s funny is that we’re not quite sure who to attribute the quote to. The consensus goes with Flaubert, but some say Michelangelo. Others go with the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or Aby Warburg.”

  “How come you know this shit?”

  “It’s called retaining trivia. Maybe someone would be kind and call it knowledge, but it’s not. It’s trivia. It’s why I would have made a great ‘Lifeline’ on Millionaire. It’s why I kicked ass at Trivial Pursuit. I can throw facts at you and quotes and all kinds of shit. But it’s all meaningless.”

  “It’s not meaningless.”

  “Yeah, right. Keep telling yourself that. Every Sunday my dad dragged us all to church, but you know what? In spite of that, I still believe in God. They taught us that God made man in His image, and that makes perfect sense. Man is a petty, awful creature. So, from that I deduce God is the pettiest and most awful creature in the universe. We’re God Lite. Are we being punished or did God just get bored and come up with a way to wipe us all out and have some fun watching the carnage in the bargain? Who watches NASCAR for the racing? People watch for the chance to see someone blown to smithereens—several someones if they’re lucky. I know that’s not an original observation, but it’s true. God’s watching this sick show and laughing His ass off.

  “I’m rambling.”

  Karl stepped back from the ledge and headed for the stairwell. As he opened the door he turned to Dabney.

  “Sorry about the jaw.”

  The door closed behind him and Dabney just stood and looked into the empty space Karl had just occupied at the ledge. He felt tired all over. Two roofs away he saw Gerri staring off into space like one of the things.

  Maybe it all was meaningless in the end.

  15

  “Is that what I look like to you or is this what I actually look like?�
�

  Ellen stood at the easel admiring Alan’s immortalization of her in oils. With tiny orangey highlights on her back from the interior candles and her extremities rim lit from the light spilling from outdoors, she actually looked radiant. All but she was softly deemphasized, warmly enveloped in rich shadow. The pose was Ingres but the painting was pure Rembrandt, its understanding of chiaroscuro complete and accomplished.

  “Alan, it’s remarkable.”

  Ellen recalled ads in her ladies’ supermarket magazines for a syrupy hack named Thomas Kinkade, so-called “Painter of Light™,” that self-appointed appellation rendered in precious curlicues. With his squinty little eyes and fey mustache, Kinkade embodied American kitsch at its worst: cloying, banal, and tacky. Alan was a genuine painter of light—and dark. Though the figure on the small canvas was gaunt, it radiated eroticism. The sweaty pinpricks of light drew attention to the sharp contours, but somehow didn’t detract from the innate femininity of the subject. The subject. Ellen. Herself.

  In all her years she’d never been captured so vividly. There were probably thousands of photographs of her, maybe even some good ones, but they all fell short. They were surpassingly two-dimensional. This representation didn’t just lie there, and even though it was a portrait of her present condition, it had life.

  “May I have this?”

  Alan hadn’t considered his attachment to this painting. While he painted he sort of zoned out, focused on technique and execution, but now that it was done he could stand back and judge the work. It was good. The best he’d done in . . .