by Daniel Kraus
“Dios mío,” said Héctor. “Mr. Finch.”
I smiled, hoping white teeth would show through the hood’s dim.
“You remember,” said I, “my real name.”
He did not look overjoyed to see me, though joy hadn’t been my expectation. From beneath his scarf I could see the pleased pudge of a tie; it was a sure sign he’d made professional headway. It was also a sign that he daren’t be late, and yet, as befitting a hero like Héctor—I called him a hero in the first full paragraph of this manuscript, Reader, and I meant it—he gnashed his broad jaw for only seconds before drawing me into a noisy, slush-floored diner, where we took a syrup-stickied booth and he ordered black coffee from a waiter visibly tempted to toss me out for repelling better-paying customers.
I was shy. Being back amid humanity’s crush overwhelmed me. As Eric had urged, people kept searching, kept struggling. I toyed with a curious foil packet of grape jam, thinking of the last time I’d felt so out of step with civilization—May 1919, when seven of the Seventh Marine Regiment, including Jason Stavros, having docked at Newport News, Virginia, spent one night in pre-Prohibition taverns, trying to recall how to laugh at normal volumes.
Héctor, too, was bashful, as our discourse before then had been curtailed to gestures through safety glass and a handful of hurried words. He stole glances over his coffee, like Church had while introducing me to his facial scars at a similar New York diner in 1925, and blinked his brown eyes in wonder. Had he and I survived Bear Claw uninfected with insanity, or had we gone so mad that all this was an elaborate delusion?
“You are . . . ,” ventured I, “of adequate health?”
Snow melted down his cheek like a tear.
“Lo siento,” whispered Héctor. “I am sorry, Mr. Finch.”
“What happened to Mr. Burke isn’t your fault.”
More snow melted.
“Lo siento. Lo siento.”
Héctor had been taking English classes at night ever since he’d gotten a job good enough that he no longer needed two, and it showed as our dialogue developed. The job, said he, was as a “technician” at the World Trade Center, a Financial District mecca bunched around twin towers that, for a flash in 1972, had been the tallest buildings in the world. How far he’d come from mopping up the spiteful urine of Bear Claw malcontents! I gleaned that he preferred the city; here, at least, malice came straight up to you, right on the street, and screamed.
How detailed is the Dearest Reader’s memory? It was upon my earliest pages that I described Héctor’s world as a far cry from ideal. His fertile wife had borne a quintet of rugrats, one of them chronically ill; his landlord was totalitarian and sadistic; his apartment verily hissed with cucarachas. All in all, bad news for Héctor, but for me, better news than I could have dreamed, for I’d come to him with an embryo of an idea, and now it birthed fully grown. A few thousand dollars would mean putting food and medicine on his family’s table, if not an entirely new table in an entirely new apartment, and a few thousand dollars was exactly what I had. Furthermore, if there was one edifice Americans would defend above all others, it was that flamboyant shrine to wealth, the World Trade Center. What tomb could be safer?
Being a man of integrity, scruples, morals, you name it, Héctor was sickened by my proposal. He stood, put two dollars under his cup, and said he had to trabajar, which was true, and ahora mismo, which was also true, though what he wanted to say was that I needed to leave him and his family alone. Say this, however, he could not, partly due to the civility ironed into his genes and partly because—and this is, of course, but a theory—he sensed, and had always sensed, an abyss inside me the likes of which he’d never before peered into, and at Bear Claw, he’d peered into hundreds.
The bulb, Reader—it hissed, went caramel—hurry, hurry—
You already know Héctor acceded to my request; let us quicken through it. My politicking combined months of elbow-taking outside the 6 train with months, I presume, of deliberation each time he heard his child cough or he watched another entitled cockroach waddle across a plate of leftovers. I recognized his acquiescence before he did and began mental preparations before he began his logistical ones. Far beneath the World Trade Center’s South Tower, explained he, was a compact sublevel, a byproduct of the skyscraper’s construction to which he had, during specific windows of time, unfettered access. It would serve my purposes, supposed he, were I determined to go through with it.
One does not doubt the word of a man like Héctor. One gives him full payment up front and trusts in him to provide.
Entombment day: I used the spot of cash I’d reserved for contingencies and purchased from a streetside rack a button-down dress shirt I put on over my sweatshirt; I did not want the putrescent condition of my apparel to draw undue notice. I also bought a pair of stretchy polyester gloves and, with the help of my teeth, put both on the same hand, jumpy about such harebrained implausibilities as one magically flying off at the wrong moment, revealing to a crucial gatekeeper my wreck of flesh. The hood I kept up—it was a common fashion among teenage slummers—and because my enshrinement was to occur at night, it was late afternoon before I started off on what would be my final walk on Earth.
The stroll was twenty-two minutes in length, so how, I ask you, could it have burned so brightly with decades of stabbing and strangling detail? At Canal Street, I saw a trio of adolescent girls—one African, one Hispanic, one Italian—pool change to buy a hot dog for a homeless man; they asked him if he wanted sauerkraut or onions. Near Finn Square, I saw a walk-up upon which had been hoisted a flag with a pink triangle, the symbol for Gay Pride, and New Yorkers trundled past without pausing to plot arsons; the triangle, observed I, was nature’s strongest shape, and also the pointiest. At the intersection of Broadway and Park Place, a kerchiefed young mother of Eastern European accent did perhaps the stupidest thing I’d seen in 113 years, stooping to pick up a spilled bag of groceries after making an unintelligible request of me, some random dirtbag, and handing me her baby to hold.
Being of one arm, I had to nestle the child against my stiff new shirt. The suckling was of diaphanous hair and chubbed cheek and gave me a look of skepticism while using shrimp fingers to tweak a button. It was so fragile, this little human; it would take no mastermind to destroy it, just a dope who quit paying attention for a single second. I held the cherub closer, until I could smell its baby-powder scalp and apple breath and diaper twang, and then held it closer still, until I could feel the puny flexes of its buttery muscles. This creature, thought I, had just entered the world, fresh and squawking, and yet would, in all likelihood, sprout into adulthood, fester into old age, and die, another damp package of spoilage buried in the earth, while I kept going and going. I kissed its warm, milky forehead with my cool, coarse lips and repeated Héctor’s plea: Lo siento. Lo siento.
What I recollect of Two World Trade Center: happy, colorful signs; sheer concourses of radiant steel; mezzanines of infinite glass; escalators to the sky, turning and turning.
Beneath it all, Héctor buried me like an acorn, perhaps to grow a family tree.
Inside the chamber, all was as promised: desk, spiral notebooks, box of pencils, simple sharpener. As the walls sealed off, the space constricted, though not in a way unfavorable; it became the cramped garage of Mr. Charles White, that refuge of birdhouse-building and radio-tinkering that carried the oil-and-sawdust smell of “know-how.” Though my know-how was never so practical, I do believe I learned a thing or two during my death and, much more so, during the writing about it, for education is inevitable, even for the most indisposed of learners, given repetition. If our little bulb will endure a few more moments, I’d like to present a weak, though concise, justification; offer you one last ghost story; and then bid you the farewell that you are owed.
First, the excuse. Let us speak of Kansas, that most American of states, which boasts two residents of worldwide renown. The first: Kal-El, Superman, whom I idolized but, alas, whose strength and virtue I
could not match. The second, however—L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy Gale of Oz—now, this lass, Reader, is instructive. Had I needed to wait one hundred years before embracing my mausoleum fate? Of course not. I had only to quit horsing around and click my damned heels. But like Ms. Gale, I could not, and why? Baum, American to his core, knew why. Our country is a land of yellow-brick roads, and who can resist them? Not Columbus, not Cortés, not the English, not the French, not the homesteaders, not the forty-niners. For me to glance backward would have been to see how my shoes had rubbed off the golden veneer, not to mention the countless witches upon whom I’d dropped countless houses. I have been the wickedest witch of all, hence this heaviest of houses dropped upon me by Héctor—and that is the extent of my mea culpa. One footnote: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He doesn’t deserve the credit He takes.
Second, a ghost story, provided you are willing to further stretch your already distended incredulity. At only one point here in my tomb did I fear discovery. One day (or night; even with the Excelsior, I’ve lost track), roughly a year after interment, there came from within the substructure a creak I recognized as the steel door through which Héctor and I had passed. Indeed, this noise was followed by a patter of footfalls. Although Héctor had promised that my chamber would be invisible to the eye, I stopped writing—indeed, stopped moving at all—and listened.
I suspect that I held that pose for two weeks. It was evident that a group of workers had traveled to my lower level to affect a repair or upgrade. They were close to my secret location but not overly; the sounds of their sledgehammers, drills, and blow torches carried through my wood/cement/brick enclosure better than their voices. It was during what I suspect was that human custom of a “lunch break” that a radio was left playing, and far more loudly than usual.
Had it been public-radio news I would’ve altered my position to cover my ears, for the notion of transmissions from the outer world nauseated me. It was, however, a music channel, playing what the deliberately blasé DJ—no Wailin’ Wendy Savage, this galoot!—dubbed “alternative music.” The puzzle as to which music these artists served as alternative (had a bombing at the Grammy Awards robbed the nation of its premier songsters?) went unsolved during the ninety-minute “rock-block” of frothing guitars and unmelodious slurring. The bands were wholly dyspeptic, with crabby names to boot: Smashing Pumpkins, Meat Puppets, Nine Inch Nails, Pavement, Hole. Doubtlessly this reflected a teenage populace disaffected by something, but what else, Reader, was new?
So it was startling when, at the butt of this block, a song began that was like the preceding music in some ways (undertuned, unvarnished) but, in other ways, altogether different. It began with muffled snares, distracted cymbals, and a laggard finger-slide down the far end of a guitar, over which a confessional female vocalist rumbled along a guttural register. The song, the DJ would tell me four minutes and ten seconds later, was called “Shane,” by a woman named Liz Fair, or Fare, or Faire, or Phair, though I prefer the first reading, as “fair” adeptly exemplifies a voice so unremarkable—like Wilma Sue in a begrimed inn or Merle in a collapsing trailer—that it was extraordinary to hear it being amplified at all.
The lyrics would snag the attention of any ex-grunt, a hazy recollection of a war breaking out, of not fathoming the scope of war’s effects, of a resistance movement, of lying in bed alongside a lover like an adult while still feeling inside like a child. This alone was enough to reach me—and then began what I can only call a chorus, though it served no classic purpose of release or catharsis, instead bottoming into a chant that echoed about as if trapped in an empty culvert. The seven-word refrain, if you can believe it, and I still cannot, was as follows:
You gotta have fear in your heart.
These words were repeated a staggering twenty-five times in a row. Who was this weary mortal who sounded as if she’d glimpsed as much pain and suffering as I’d seen straight on? And having only glimpsed it, was her vision truer than one who’d been fully blinded? Her chorus—my chorus—Reader, it’s all mixed up—clanged about my skull long after the DJ jettisoned listeners to commercials, after the repairmen returned, after they’d packed it up for the day, and then the week, and then, for all I know, forever. As often as I’d heard this warning since Luca Testa’s first utterance, never had it come from one whose voice reached out to me like a hand, slow in sadness, true, but also in the certainty of the durability of sadness. Ms. Fair’s fingers laced into mine, and her cool lips settled upon my burnt ear, and I believe, Reader, that she whispered the truth to me at last; that or I merely managed, over these final months of reflection, to arrive at the understanding myself.
The first question I asked upon discovering, in the Barker’s tent, that I was a corpse: Why me, Gød, why me? Bunny Tucker, I have come to believe, was the one to chisel closest, shouting to me, Of course it’s your story, isn’t it? Amerika’s story is always going to be yours. White. Male. Probably rich. I wasn’t a random target of Gød, but rather chosen on purpose from the most privileged clique of the most privileged country; in other words, those who’d lost the animal sense of fear with which all of us are born.
But, Zebulon, you protest, even inside that 1 percent populace, your selection came at Job-like odds! I know, Reader; this has been my complaint. Yet I find myself contemplating the long, tangled string of geologic metamorphoses, biologic anomalies, societal upheavals, historical partialities, individual passions, and stupid flukes that had to occur to put me here, scribbling words, and you there, reading them. Is that not every bit as impossible? There’s two impossibilities. So why not three? Why not three million? We are one miracle interlinked with another, and another, and another, entire heavens located upon this single page as well as inside the fingertip that turns it.
The fear, I think, is staying aware of the miracle, of being young to the experience as opposed to being old to it. The walking dead aren’t the cannibal creations of Mr. Romero but rather those people you see every day, stumbling through daily circles, lifeless already for having lost the fear. Are you seventeen, Reader? Or seventy-seven? It matters not. Pitch fear like coal into the combustor, stoke it, keep the shovelfuls coming, and you shall always be alive, always be young.
Third and final, my farewell. I have put into place an emergency plan, should these pages be discovered before they are matured to proper vintage. Weeks ago I sacrificed a page to compose a letter, which I have inserted beneath the front cover of the first notebook. It is addressed to an attorney by the name of Kraus, who helped Héctor and others in his building prepare a suit against their landlord. The threat of lawsuit was enough to get the boiler fixed, but the attorney remained pally with Héctor, who spoke of him as a gentleman of discretion. Discretion—that is what these notebooks would need, and so my letter assigns them to the care of this Mr. Kraus. Héctor even told me of the attorney’s three grown children, one a chemical engineer, one a speech pathologist, and one (poor kid) a writer; all told, they sound like decent folk. Besides, have I better options?
The story, you see, keeps going. It does not end with me. It ends with you, and for this I am heartened—the Excelsior, my heart, ticks more loudly—can you hear it? I admit that I first called you “Dearest” with sarcasm. Tonight, though, I say it with a terrible true passion. I’ve written a half-million words, and what those words have built is not a book but rather a time machine with which I’ve been able to travel back and regard myself at pivotal points. This second-chance odyssey, however, I did not have to make alone. You were there, my Dearest Reader. I saw your tolerant smile when I was insulting, heard your hitched breath when I requested witness, felt your arms around me when I needed to be upheld. If love matters, and it does, may I put forward that I love you? I place a kiss upon your head as I did when saying good-bye to my sleeping mother: au revoir, au revoir. You let me borrow your fear—me, who never deserved it—and, for a little while, pretend that it was mine.
What I wish to give to you in return is the less
on of la silenziosità as revealed by Merle’s vision. The past is perpetually in play, always malleable, ever salvageable. Did any of this story happen as I said it did? The telling of a tale puts a prism to it from which incalculable new angles rainbow forth. You made this as real as I; remember it however you’d like. What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined. Go out; break things. Go further; repair them. Break hundreds of hearts. Have thousands of children. Discover awe in a tangle of weeds; find delight in the pattern of a roll of mass-produced paper towels; live, Reader, live; live as hard as I died, and only then I will be happy.
Go ahead now, set down this page. Do not worry. It is not abandonment. Another reader will pick it up before long, and somehow, through the shared enchantment of the human heart, it will still be You, Dearest Reader, and it will still be Me. It’s funny, isn’t it? While we were distracted by the silly scraps that make up human history, you and I became eternal, impervious to rot, infinity itself. It is a sight better than you might have accomplished by yourself (this I think) and far better than I could have accomplished alone (this I know).
Oh!—the light, it gutters—
It is out, now, gone, gone, gone—
I cannot see the page—
But my old hand is as sure as a young one—
Now I rest that hand, and my soul as well—
It is your hands I am in from here on out, Reader—
And there is none other to whom I’d rather yield.
Yours in the ranks of death,
CURTAIN CALL
[TC: +07.41.89.07. T: 07:16:06. N: 41°53’41.3023°. W: -87°37’25.8791°.
I/O: 00:05:19. ID: 009-098-813-8911-2191]
