Heathern

by Jack Womack

  Our drinks were on our booth's table. Gus sipped from each before we drank. He and Jake-who had accompanied us here-took the outer seats, walling us off from the crowd. Jake brushed debris from my corner of the booth and I sat across from the Drydens. Susie looked at her-husband as if recounting the ways she'd loved him.

  "I hate this place," she said. "These animals."

  "Can't isolate yourself all the time, darlin'," he said. "Look at poor old Elvis. It's the courtiers kill the king."

  "Fuck Elvis," she said. "Look at you. Mister man of the people. Some man."

  "Some people." Something brushed my foot; I jerked it away, having seen rats in better places. Beneath oak beams, amid tankards and pewter and steel engravings were hundreds at drudgeful play. A post-teen broker barked, crawling on his fours, his tie sweeping the floor; two women armwrestled, their flowcharts forgotten, keeping their sneakered feet firm against their chairs as each struggled to toss the other; I-bankers shook breadsticks at one another as if casting untried spells. An aging mentor at barside held forth before his adminassists and executaries, forking his hand into a cheese-ball, licking his fingers clean as he spoke. Any abomination was excusable so long as you lived in New York.

  Gus illustrated a proper table setting with the unused dinnerware for Jake; to his mind social graces were as essential as social control. "Salad fork always to the left of the regular fork," he explained.

  "AO," said Jake, examining the tines of both. Something returned to caress my leg. Slipping off his shoe so as not to ruin my hose, Thatcher ran his foot along my calves, appearing to his audience so expertly vacant that he might have been running for office.

  "Anyone here might try and do the do," said Susie, rescuing her olives, drying her hand by rubbing her short hair, hoping perhaps to bleach the gray into platinum tones. "Pop out of the crowd and bingo. You know that." Gus frowned; in this season he wore his memories so poorly. "What are you trying to prove?"

  "Not trying to prove nothing, darlin'. Just enjoying myself while I can," he said, his foot writhing over my knees. I froze, showing nothing to anyone. I dreamed of assassinating him when he prodded my thighs with his toes. "It's the edge that makes life worthwhile. Dancing through the minefields of life. Like flying over the border at night with all the lights off. Like dropping in on the competition when they're not expecting company. Just cause somebody lives straight doesn't mean they don't need a rush now and then."

  "You're such a fool-"

  "Too damn paranoid, darlin', that's your problem," he said, laughing. "My boys don't miss when they aim." Clamping his lips onto her cheek as if to feed, he simultaneously thrust his foot between my legs until he could push it no further; he wriggled his toes as if squeezing mud between them. Choking, I dropped my glass; Jake caught it, not spilling a drop. "What's the matter, hon?" Thatcher asked, his eyes postcoital as he drew back his foot.

  "Went down the wrong way," I said, pressing my legs together, feeling to have given birth to something unwanted. "I'm all right."

  Susie stared at me, anxious to convict, keen to execute, no more sympathetic than any judge; my innocence was no less real than any defendant's. "Paranoid," she repeated. "You're the one with the lock on every lid. Always claiming you'll spoon it out next Christmas-"

  "I've helped you grasp the intangibles of the situation," he said.

  "Imagine what I could do with whatever's in your files." He nodded, saying nothing. "You're so good keeping secrets when you want to. This thing you're sending her off on tomorrow. What is it you want her to look for? What's she going to find? You act like you think you're really onto something."

  "Maybe." A feigned guilelessness came naturally to him. "Let's not talk business after work, darlin'-"

  "No better time to talk it," she said. "What's this creep got that you want?"

  He looked toward the ceiling as he spoke, seeming to visualize something he didn't yet own. "Somebody drops by your house on their way someplace else," he said, "and they go to the bathroom while they're there, and stop up the pipes shittin' gold, you're not going to call a plumber."

  She had no response to his homily. Susie had known him from before the beginning, when he and his brother owned nothing but a plane and a field in the Colombian highlands. He admitted to me once that her business acumen brought them to where they were, but only because he had, as he put it, such blind fool timing. I can't imagine she'd ever gotten used to him.

  "If there's something you're not telling me, I wish you would," I said, doubting that I would be heard, much less answered. "What've you got me walking into?"

  His smile resembled an old incision, a caesarean scar. "If I knew for sure I'd tell you, but I don't. Just take a look and let me know." He raised his glass. "A toast."

  "To what?" Susie asked, lifting hers; a waiter refilled it.

  "Everything," he said, a whisper to his mother.

  Jake held my jacket for me when we rose to leave; I smiled at him, and he grinned in return, his face full of blessings. Gus led us, Jake tailed us; the crowd parted for our movement as if for a clump of bellringing lepers. Everyone in the place must have worked for Dryco, directly or indirectly; reason enough for circumspection. We waited in enveloping night for our cars to arrive. From the west a blur breezed past Thatcher and Gus; a bicycle messenger racing a delivery to one who couldn't wait, each knowing nothing more valuable than a little more time.

  "Watch it!" the messenger shouted, flashing by. As he shot beneath an unbroken streetlight Jake fired. The bicycle passed some distance beyond the light's cone before falling over. Gus put his hand on Jake's shoulder.

  "You rushed, Jake," he said. "That's why I didn't act. I could see he was unarmed."

  "I'm sorry," said Jake, his knowledge seeming too much for him as he covered his mouth with his hand.

  "Remember breath, though. Breathe in as you fire and hold it. Then let it go a few times after." Gus demonstrated. "Like a train. Gets air back into the head."

  "Just wing 'em next time, Jake," said Thatcher, dry of emotion. I knew that within he rocked as if in an earthquake. "Low-key. That's the way."

  I rode home in a Dryco car to my apartment on King Street, which Dryco also provided; Thatcher gave me many nails that I might use. I lived in the bottom two floors of an 1825 townhouse refitted to postmod standards by the previous occupants. They'd lost it during the Readjustment; maybe they never deserved it, I'd tell myself. Maybe I passed them each morning as they raked at my clothes, calling for pennies, crying for change. On the street and on my stoop were syringes and shards of bottle-glass left by passersby to remind the street's residents how long we'd lingered at our own edges, relying on balance so we wouldn't fall in.

  My neighbor on the third floor wasn't screaming. Wrapping my comforter around me when I got into bed as if expecting recovery a thousand years hence, I let my memory squeeze me unconscious. A friend who lived in the neighborhood I'd be visiting told me a story that never made the news. Sixty problem people were shot in Corlears Hook Park by the Army. Sanitation men came in white trucks and buried them in red bags. A woman went to the landfill, after. With bare hands she tore away the earth until she found her husband. Retucking the others beneath their blanket, she carried him off that he might sleep alone. One who watched as she patted the earth down upon his new bed asked where she'd go now. To the grocery, she said, I got mouths to feed.

  TWO

  While waiting at the stoplight we watched tanks roll down First Avenue. In the Readjustment's early months so many control vehicles collapsed through the pavement into the subway that those remaining assigned to Manhattan now only traveled those streets with thicker crusts. A semblance of calm prevailed for the moment in the city's more disgruntled neighborhoods; many within the government, especially Army personnel-some even within Dryco-wished to remove the soldiers from New York as they'd been removed from other cities and send them into Long Island where they were needed. The Drydens said no; the Army couldn't control trouble
if it wasn't around to start it.

  "It's sad that so many hope for better," said Avi, staring into the one-way glass as if watching his favorite show. "Hope's the truest opium. Better that people work with what they have. But no, they dream that the man on the white donkey will ride up and put everything in its place. As a dream, it's cancer."

  "Hasn't cancer a purpose?" I asked, still dreaming that one day I might win an argument with Avi that he admitted to my having won.

  "It makes people appreciate the world for what it is," he said.

  One tank lagged after the rest, the litter's runt. Had the driver not recognized our car as one of Dryco's own and, for laughs, turned its turret toward us, I don't know what Avi would or could have done. All in Security were able in all fields; Avi, after Gus, was ablest, but I never hoped that he might always save us.

  "I've always told you you'd be happier if you took your life for what it is. As would they. It's only karma."

  Our car inched eastward on Ninth Street. During the night a cold front swept the clouds from the sky; morning sun glinted off the tears of millions.

  "Karma?" I repeated. "Schmeggege. You're some Hindu." He smiled, hearing a word from a language he chose to lose. Avi's family were Lubavitcher Hasidim; he left his old world while still in his teens. During his twenties he feasted from faith's buffet, swallowing and passing Unitarianism, Catholicism, Reform Judaism, Buddhism, and more, at last assembling a plate of scraps from which he might thereafter nibble. His unshaken tenet was a belief in an afterlife so redemptive of the life lived before that he saw no greater purpose to his own existence than to relieve others of theirs.

  "Take it as a brand name," he said. "Like Kleenex or Lasereo or God. A word you understand without knowing the meaning." He cleaned his glasses with a silk handkerchief his fiancee had given him. "Even media agree," he said, handing me his copy of Newsweek. "For the Six Billion," the cover's blurb read, referring to those who'd left our station on the 20th-Century train. I'd scanned the article earlier, finding simple words that presumed to summon understanding from the years during which the perfect Victorian world became our neopost one. Perhaps the editors hoped that unexpected patterns might emerge from what they threw across the pages, but the only pattern these days was the one from which everyone's clothes were cut. There were familiar scenes from the family album; image upon image: Elvis beside Hitler, Joyce next to the Beatles; the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square on V-J Day side-by-side with the burning girl running down the Vietnamese road; Gorbachev's face was shoved between frame 313 of the Zapruder film and the first platoon marching over the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge.

  "It seems to me that what we live through are only birth pangs, that the deepest pain awaits after delivery," Avi said. "Who knows? Because ours is a sick world doesn't mean we shouldn't love it."

  At the street's far corner was an abandoned Benetton. On its Ninth Street side was a mural limned by locals, showing a line of ill-drawn skeletons wearing gray pinstripes resembling my own, raising metatarsals higher than their skulls in synchronised kick. "Hell's Rockettes," he said. "Terrible perspective."

  "They've painted over the numbers along here," our driver said, slowing that we should neither miss the place nor run anyone down.

  "It's a few doors west of Avenue A," I said. "That's it."

  Excepting the entrance, the building resembled its six-story neighbors, one of a row of cadavers awaiting a new day's lesson. The old tenement architects had often chiseled names above their building's outer doorways, allowing fresh-arrived immigrants a new world dream, that their hovels were not so much less than the Dakota or the Belnord. The steel door of Macaffrey's school was painted chrome yellow; the name above-Hartman-gleamed with smudged gilt. The worn faces of stone seraphim poked from twin circles that bookended the word; each circle was formed from three pairs of wings. The angels' eyes poured down their cheeks, as if without suspicion they'd glimpsed this world's Trinity.

  "Don't bother them, Avi," I said, referring to those yet unblinded, the ones on the curbs and steps and stoops. Figures I had read claimed that Loisaida's population density approached what it had been at the turn of the previous century, but that didn't seem possible; too many of the old buildings were gone, and the streets could not have lodged so many.

  "If it's necessary I act, Joanna. You know that."

  The grace of Avi's that doomed and saved was that he understood his own purpose so well. After we emerged the driver locked the car from within; electrified its body for our visit's duration. Dozens at once encircled and separated us, waving empty cups in outstretched hands, their cloud buzzing as might a beehive's.

  "Money," they cried. "Please. Money for food. Money."

  I allowed my eyes to lose their focus, that it would seem those people were not truly there. Shaking lesioned fingers from my shoulders, I tried to push through. Someone shoved a fist into my pants pocket, restraining me. "You got money, bitch," my assailant said, yanking as if to rip away my clothes; he was too weak to do more than hold me back. His eyes were as dead as an angel's. "Give it to me." I tried to escape but he wouldn't, or couldn't, free his hand.

  "Avi," I shouted; he swam toward me through the crowd. "Get him away-

  "Gimme money-" Avi's hand encircled the man's neck. I pulled him from my pocket as Avi lowered him to the sidewalk. The crowd dispersed, seeming much calmer. Avi let go, took my arm and led me off.

  "You killed him?" I asked, my leg still warm with the man's touch.

  He nodded. "Forget." We dashed up the school's worn stairs. Avi used unarmed methods that shed no blood and therefore left him sinless. Forget? I tried. Though I'd housebroken compassion, I still wet my bed at night.

  Once buzzed in we entered a hall that was enlarged to serve as foyer. Posters taped asymmetrically around the walls bandaged the plaster's wounds. Some enumerated medical litanies and the ninety-eight warning signs of cancer. Another gave numbers to call in event of rape, robbery, accident, or suicide, with no assurance of any answer to any question. A third, drawn in garish colors, diagrammed the proper use of contraceptives. One poster was but a photo of kittens sitting among flowers. They looked stuffed. A fiftyish woman sat behind a paintspeckled desk. She had fresh mums in a jar and fresh gauze around her arm.

  "We're from Dryco," I said. "We have an appointment to see Lester Macaffrey."

  The doctors must have taken her larynx in removing her cancer; when she spoke she lifted a microphone to her throat, her generated voice sounding more mechanical than a Toyota's. "Third floor, second door on the right."

  As she returned to her work we began ours, ascending the narrow stairs at the rear of the hall. Former residents, the apartment-dwellers past, left nothing behind but their vegetable tang, the faint odors of cooked lentils, boiled cabbage and, as if we passed a marketstall, a whiff of cilantro. It seemed too quiet to be a school. The drawings of students hung on the walls we passed.

  "Good color sense," said Avi. "You expect a thematic repetition, considering their age."

  Some of the pictures might have been drawn by any child living in Beirut or Belfast or Johannesburg. Others were identifiable as designs of our neighborhoods. In those, crowds raced from distant buildings that spewed inky clouds, soldiers shot young men in their yards, children ran after wagons carrying off their dogs. An artist of a tradition al school sketched a suburban design, unexceptional but for detail: a mother and father stood before their house, holding the hands of half a child. The gallery continued beyond the third floor; we went no further. Hearing at last the sound of children's laughter, I wondered at whom they laughed. On the glass of Macaffrey's door a stenciled message read Knowledge is Danger.

  "Visitors," called a man's voice when I knocked. "Come on in." Avi slipped ahead of me, opening the door; I saw him, inside. Macaffrey's look was that of a million's; once out of my sight, I couldn't have more accurately described his look than a cloud's. "Sit with the rest or stand in the corner."

  Choosin
g to stand, we noted absentees: there were no desks, no chairs, no books or blackboard, no TV or tapeplayer. Only half the windows had glass; on this cool day all wore their wraps. The unobservant might have found the pupils no more memorable than their teacher. They must have had homes, for all appeared washed, and if Macaffrey supplied their clothes he must have provided detergent as well. Perhaps he had trouble with shoes; most wore sandals fashioned from strips of tire and rope. A girl sitting in the front row, her hands clasped before her in her lap, spoke to us. The rest of the class was preternaturally still.

  "We were-" She halted, and scratched her head, searching for the word she wanted; each of her hands bore an extra thumb. "Discussing, that's it. We were discussing the fall of man." She laughed. "Man's first disobedience. The fruit of that tree."

  "You're studying Milton?" I asked.

  He looked at me; I stared between his eyes as he spoke, as if I were being interviewed. "Biblical interpretation of every sort has its purpose, you know." Avi and I frowned in unison, as might twins, each of us surely thinking that we had found nothing more than the usual fundamentalist continuing to eat through the woodwork. Scholars sus pected that American students would find the legend of creationism no more comprehensible than the theory of evolution, therefore remaining untainted by either, but I had my doubts, and suspected Macaffrey of being one of those keen to demonstrate to the young that the only proper logic is none at all; so I imagined, until he began.