by Rick Moody
A long two or three minutes we were locked inside, in our stationary subway car. There were faces pressed up against the outside, a wall of faces, and these faces would look down into that space under the train, never satisfied until they had apprehended why, and then their faces would knot uncomfortably at what information they now possessed. I resolved that I wouldn’t be one of these people, one of those who had to see. When the door at the end of the car was at last opened from the platform by a man with a high-visibility vestment, people filed off, and the announcement began to cycle on the P.A., lasshnnrnd genmhhnhnssbrs… What a processional, all of us filing out, Before him went the pestilence, burning coals went forth at his feet, by arrangement of Excellent Destiny, the woman I had nearly crushed touched me on the arm, beside me now, in the queue, Do you think he’s all right?
I thought, since I experienced trauma as a convulsion of the imagination, Who’s the guy’s mother and what did he have for lunch and did he ever drive a hydrofoil and did he ever feed a dolphin and how old was he when he lost his virginity and did he know the difference between a coniferous tree and a deciduous one and who was his favorite Yankee and did he know the table of the elements and how many women did he love and who were they all and are they all happy and did they do the things they wanted to do and did he have a kid brother and did he ever play a musical instrument and what is the woman he was meeting thinking right now and what is his mother thinking and is his head separated from his neck or his leg separated from hip, his inner organs like stew upon the undercarriage of the express? Of course, I knew the answers to these questions and knew the answers to others, too, through my sophisticated foreknowledge, even if my step was unsteady, even if I felt like I might pass out. I made reply to the woman; I said poetical words that had only recently occurred to me, Ihave a couple of tickets to the Knicks, they’re about to lose to Philadelphia, but I won’t tell you the score. I was going to sell one of the tickets anyhow.Let’s make something good out of something bad. I had never ever asked a woman out before.
The emergency guy at the door remarked, Let’s get a move on, pal, we got a situation.
My wife, because that’s who she was, my solace, my destiny, my respite, because that’s the substance of what I am telling you, detrained, but she froze on the platform, shoulders trembling suddenly as she held a pulped tissue to her nose, and crowds surrounded us, a gathering of disgruntled New Yorkers, getting home late from the office, or trying to get home late, while down the stairs came the paramedics, with their stretchers. In every part of this story, the stretcher-bearers eventually come. To my wife, I said, No big deal, if its too sudden. I’d understand. I just don’t feel right tonight. I don’t feel like being alone.
What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering way, the kind who doesn’t even notice how she keeps having to buy larger jeans, the kind who likes big cars because she doesn’t like to be uncomfortable. I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that Everything will be roses.
She gave me her number. On the fortieth day of our acquaintance, I proposed.
Soon I was living near the water in the Bronx. Not far from City Island. What I loved about that part of the world was how the swamps persisted long after the city planners had tried to do away with them. Co-Op City rising out of the swamps, the cattails and the trash, the Bruckner Expressway kids actually attempting to fish in the rivers —unwor-ried about hepatitis, unworried about PCB’s. Old unsteady docks, skiffs that leaked, a clustering of powerboats, all in the shadow of low-cost housing. My wife and I were newly-weds in our little place with the screened-in porch in back and the quarter acre, and I had just got this job on the retail desk, where I attempt to persuade regular folks to gamble away their meager savings. Every day since I was trained I had known I was going to lose my job, and sometimes for weeks at a time I wouldn’t allow my wife to touch me because I was so disgusted with who I was, with the bands of useless pork on me, with my fulsome breasts, with my joyless prognostications.
You might be wondering why my brother hasn’t turned up in these prophecies until now. Any idea what it is like to grow up the homely older brother of the most gifted, the most talented, the most revered kid on your block? Any idea what it is like to look at the basketball hoop in the driveway and to see your brother sailing past it, in slow motion, grinning an unspeakable grin, dunking the ball with his offhand, finishing a soda, lighting a firecracker, all at the same time, while the Cosa Nostra kids from up the block curse under their breaths for having again lost the two-on-one? Any idea what it’s like having your own brother beat you in a drug deal in which he sells you a mixture of oregano and fresh basil and then, to give credence to his salesmanship, smokes some of it with you and comments on its potency?
My brother Jack refused to speak to me in the cinder-block halls of New Rochelle High, unless these halls were empty, unless we were alone, and even then he would answer only yes or no to questions having to do with what time we were to be picked up, or the hour of a certain dentist appointment. My brother carried a golf club everywhere he went, a seven iron, and swung at me with it. My brother swiped twenty dollars from my mother’s purse, to wager on the ponies, brought back forty dollars from O.T.B., put the twenty back in her purse, left a ten in the offertory plates at Mass on Sunday. My brother never liked me, as he never liked American cars, black jeans, health foods, girls without makeup. My brother Jack never liked to talk about what didn’t go his way, or about our father, or about my second sight. He was handsome. He liked tailored suits. He liked his socks to match his shirt.
I am well pleased with my two sons, my mom said wearily, when the two of us fought, like the time I chased him around the entire house with an ax, threatening, cursing him/swinging the ax, I’m going to bury this thing in your skull, and then I’m going to watch your brains run out and I’m going to eat your brains. He locked himself in the bathroom, and I was banging on the door with the dull side of the ax, until I had managed to put the ax through the door, and he was yelling, Christ, he’s insane, Mom, can’t you get him to back off; my mother waited patiently, until the hitch in my swing, the dormancy in me, when I turned to her, Why has everything been so easy for him?
My brother and I fought the whole next ten years, my brother Jack and me, as I correctly predicted, threats shouted at holidays, even after I met my wife, even after my marriage ceremony (my best man was Joey Kaye, the guy whose dad paralyzed Bobby Erlich for life). My brother missed my wedding because he’d been at a club in the Village called Silver Screen, where he said whatever he had to say in order that he might persuade one Elise, an alcoholic, to go to a motel in Yonkers with him, where he was doing lines with her on a pocketbook mirror and watching motel pornography, the swooping arc of enhanced breasts, a nipple coming in and out of focus, simulated yelps of longing. He had never seen a girl with such large tattoos, and in such unusual spots. Was it her or was it the actress on the screen who was so vocal? Elise wanted to be an actress, and her uncle had incested her, but she made him phenomenally happy for two hours, and he her, at least until they ran out of their talc, and then when she woke in the morning my brother was back at the car dealership, moving the Beemers, as he said, wearing an Armani double-breasted suit, totally forgetting that he was supposed to be at my wedding. I know all these things.
One day some years later, who should come knocking at the back door but my brother Jack, wearing clothes that eerily resembled the garb of detectives from a popular television show of the period: a designer suit in pale blue and a polyester T-shirt of dusty ros
e. He was at the back door, see, while my wife and I were eating deviled eggs and sprigs of parsley; here he was wearing pastel colors, smiling in a way that signaled bad news ahead.
What’s he doing here? my wife said, loud enough that he would not mistake the words. She’d never forgiven him for missing the wedding and for sending us a set of plastic nesting bowls as a gift, and she rose up from the table on the porch, her green paper napkin still tucked in her neckline, and hastened indoors, where she turned on some opera, loud.
He rapped on the aluminum siding, though I was two feet away. We were in plain sight of one another.
Who do you think it is?
Oh, hey. A long-lost relative. A good-looking guy with a flimsy pretext.
Thought I’d drop by.
So you did.
What the hell’s going on? he attempted. Iwanted to say that I feel bad about things, you know? I feel bad about things and I want to straighten it out. I thought I’d come on over and we’d have a talk. We could set things right again and we could hoist a few beers together. Talk about it all.
He was still out on the step, and he was shading his eyes, though wearing sunglasses. He had a scrape on his cheek. There was an earnestness to his simulations.
That’d be great, I said, but Tanya and I have an engagement, if you want to know the truth, so I only have a couple of minutes.
What kind of engagement?
Precious Jewels and Stones show. At the Coliseum. Going to be a big rush on the first day.
It went on like that, each of us maneuvering for a purchase. One guy makes a slip, the other guy grabs for the handhold, crowds in. Soon my brother Jack began to warm to his ulterior motive. He was always a guy who couldn’t sit still for long.
Why don’t you come out front here, Jack said. Igot something I want to show you.
The screen door slapped at its frame. I figured I’d get it over with. We went around the alley, between Frattelli’s place and ours. Fratelli’s garden hose coiled by the edge of his lawn. Frattelli’s excessively healthy floribunda, a spigot on the side of our house still dripping, though I had put a washer in there only a week before. I wanted a life with a minimum of fuss. Woe to them that are wise in their eyes.
It was a gold Porsche.
Mergers in the automobile business will continue apace, and soon General Motors will be making Bentleys, and the same barely functioning engines that are under the hoods of American cars will soon be under the hoods of fancy foreign models, and it will be good for stock prices, and even good for the Gross National Product, but not good for cars themselves. That’s the limit of my interest on the subject. What’s a car, my fellow-Americans, but a system for conveyance, as I was recently telling Sasha Levin of Forest Hills, before she had time to complain about her under-performing account; I’ll buy any car, a Reliant K, a Breeze, a Cavalier, I don’t care too much, and Tanya doesn’t either, and we tend to leave bottles rattling around in the footwells in the back seat, to take up the space where the kids should have gone. A Porsche to me was just another car, and mainly I saw behind it some Organized Crime Figure or Junk Bond Trader who rode your bumper and talked on a cellular phone while flipping you the bird. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Porsches, or Jaguars, or Corvettes. I looked back at my house. I saw my wife, Tanya, in a window upstairs. A curtain fell across her face.
Isn’t she a beauty? My brother said hurriedly. He meant the car.
What the hell are you doing showing me this Porsche? Let’s get this over with, okay?
What’s the rush?
It was dented up. In a way that, for me, exactly recalled an earlier car crash and an earlier victim, which is to say that the passenger side was mashed, one headlight completely eliminated, and I’m pretty sure the axle was bent and the front fender mangled up in there, rubbing against the oil pan. There was flourescent gunk running in my driveway.
I just hosed this driveway.
Hey, I’m sorry, Jack said. Listen, I just want to know if I can park this in your garage for a couple of days.
I looked at my Timex with imitation Cordovan strap and wondered why eighteen minutes for this request. He had his own car dealership where he worked, and his own auto mechanics who would bang out a few dents, no questions asked, and he had always boasted that he could get an inspection sticker for me easy. It was not a good sign, his request, and I asked why I had to have this car in my garage, and he said that he’d busted it up right nearby, out on the river road, and he had things to do, and some points on his license, and just wanted to leave it for a couple of days, wouldn’t be any trouble, and he’d buy me a case of beer or something to make it worth my while.
And that was when I noticed the blood inside. The interior of the Porsche was leather, a ruddy leather interior, and there was blood on the dash, on the molded foam, where the air bag would later have gone, there was a dried splotch of blood from where some forehead had collided with the windshield, and I squinted at it discerningly, at the inevitability of another life coming to an end, the failure of it, of life leaking out on the leather.
Is this blood in this car?
What the hell are you talking about? My brother replied.
I asked if this was blood.
There’s no blood in the car. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Why was a spillage of blood always an emblem of my troubled march in this world, why these pieces of bodies, these cascading morsels of corporeal material, why this length of tibia broken jaggedly off at the knee, with tufts of muscle still clinging to it, why, in my dreams, the stretcher bearers, why the dead boys, why the high-impact collisions, again and again, why the spectacle of young men running into stationary objects, why the lamppost with the D.U.I. wrapped around it, a hand separated from a wrist, by some fifty feet, vertebrae like popcorn scattered across the bucket seats?
I said, Get your goddamn car out of here now, what do you mean by bringing this thing around here? Did you kill someone, in this car? Am I accessory to all your blunders? Like I don’t have enough blunders of my own? What are you doing here? I’m not related to you, I don’t have even one characteristic that you have. I started loud, admittedly, but I got quieter, because I knew, in the middle of my tirade I knew, this fragmentary bunch of people, this collection of lost souls, my family, they were rushing further off now, like some distant hurtling margin of the negatively spherical universe, they were further off during this conversation, and when this conversation was over, they would be impossibly far away—cousins, aunts, uncles, of old bipolar Eire, my father, there would be only my mother’s death left to survive, my mother alone in her little house in New Rochelle one block over from a shuttered Main Street, and when my brother climbed into his Porsche —which had a left front flat, I now saw —the last of my uncertain futures would be certain.
With a fluttering of his pinky-ringed hand, my brother tried to get me to play cool. I’m gone before you know it Man, if I came here singing songs of love, even then you’d bounce me out on my ass.
Now the backing away of my brother Jack, blond dealer of exotic high-performance cars, future dealership owner. I waited for the threatening language, but the silence of his departure was instantaneous. Iwill not punish your sons when they commit whoredom. I knew, I knew. I knew where the police would find the body of poor Elise from the club called Silver Screen, out by the woods at the edge of the golf course in Pelham. There’s always trouble at the edge of this golf course, you know, because it’s the edge of New York City, it’s the beginning of the suburbs, and every threshold must have its darkness, and so Elise, who was incested when young, got driven to the edge of this wood, where she drank wine with my brother, and they kissed, and they cavorted, and they lived such lives as I have never lived, and then they took a dirt road there, by the edge of the canal, where there were only torched hulks of cars, stripped of all but the smoking exterior chassis, the steering column, muffler, disc brakes, upholstery all gone, my brother, at thirty-four mi
les per hour in an avenue zoned for twenty-five, drove into a tree, knocked her unconscious, ditched her body, flung away its wedding band, and then after the visit to me abandoned the stolen car, the car he brought into the city to impress her, or to impress someone like her, and he waded down into the lifeless river just beyond the woods, and he dove in, in his Armani suit, drifted downstream, in a narcissistic reverie. Leaving no trail.
Remember Melissa Abdow? The girl who saw Bobby Erlich’s crash? Amazing thing. She called last week, at work. (The surfaces of my cubicle are appallingly clean. My rolodex is blank. Here’s a photograph of Tanya wearing a yellow dress.) Melissa wanted a little advice on the inverted yield curve, What’s going to be the effect on treasuries, as a conservative type of investment? She and her husband were trying to salt away some funds for their kid’s college education. And she got my number from somebody who got it from somebody. Research, that morning, had brought in some disappointing news from the markets. It was also scrolling across my computer screen. Full kingdom blessing on traders of bonds, they shall run like mighty men. The horseman lifteth up the bright sword. That I.P.O. for the new web portal is going to sell out fast. Melissa asked about my brother. How’s Jack anyway? Something in my tone made her ask, I knew, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. If it’s possible for a voice to have worry lines, Melissa’s voice had them, when she was speaking to me. My brother? My brother, Melissa? I started and I couldn’t stop. I admitted that I hadn’t seen my brother in years, seven years, that he had married a lovely girl, Elise, and I didn’t go to his wedding, you know, I smote you with blasting and with mildew, because I was ashamed; he had smashed up Elise’s brother’s Porsche not long before the ceremony, cut himself kind of badly, and he came to me for aid and counsel, and I drove him out of the house, and you know how it is with brothers, Melissa, you know how it is.
My wife keeps calling down the basement staircase to where I’m sitting here enveloped in darkness, tightening wood screws on a small racing car that I have made for my nephew, Danny. I have made him many toys. A day of darkness, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as morning spreads upon the mountains, the bugs are kind of bad down here, Take me and cast me into the sea. This basement with its cinder blocks and its exposed bulb, this suits me. Seven years now, a biblical interval, and it was just a little thing. I was a jumpy, anxious person, hard to get along with, I suppose; amazing that I have kept my job this long, when I cannot be comforted. It was just some car that I refused to have in my garage, you would think that would be enough, that it could be forgotten. And I haven’t even set eyes upon my brother’s boy, except in that Christmas card that came this last year (his hair like a crown of goldenrod), and there’s Elise, with the strawberry-highlights, I don’t get too many cards, it’s almost a week now here that I have been worrying about the boy, waiting for my brother to call, our Chevy is gassed and ready. There was a time when everybody knew the future, but a few wise types elected to forget what was to come, as we all elect, eventually, to forget the past. Forgetters raised up many children and made songs of praising, I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. Please let me be wrong again. About that sick boy. Let me be wrong.
