He considered. “Yop.”
“Manuel still in there.”
“By a hair.”
“I better get him. Some night, he gonna get it.” Simpson didn’t move.
“Why?”
“Lotos was busted. Last summer.”
“Going to be busted again, ha?”
“Working up to it.”
“And Manuel won’t buy.”
“When the bust came, he was at the hospital, with his wife. He and she used to go in there every night. Can’t turn him off the place. Six other Spanish bars, my beat. He won’t go.”
He took a moment to transfer his stuff from an outer pocket to an inner. For the morning. “Maybe he’s waiting to be found. Don’t knock it.”
“You think he’s buying?”
He considered. When they sold the coat, would Manuel take any? “No, he won’t buy. But he’ll go along with it.”
“Not too far.” Simpson rubbed his teeth. “Funny. They must know they’ll be busted. But it’s the kibitzer who’ll make them sore; I’ve seen it before.”
“That why you’re following him?”
“Come again. He’s teaching me horses. Puerto Rico, he used to handle them.”
“He didn’t really look like a Chicano. None of them.”
“Why should they—Why’m I telling you this?”
“Because I don’t drive a cab.”
“Smartass. Maybe you better come down to the station-house. Know I seen you somewhere. Down at the hack-license bureau, maybe. Checking something there only today. Maybe you better.”
For Blum to get him out in the morning. Or Push & Shove. “I’ll miss my flight.”
“More I look at you—flight, huh? Lemme see those papers back.”
“Maybe you saw my picture, the Journal.”
“Is no Journal, anymore.”
“Wall Street.”
He felt flattened suddenly, without a sound. Though he was still standing, the street came up in his eyes to remind him that this was what men walked on, here.
Simpson was looming over him. “You undercover, huh? You won’t fine annathing. I’m straight.”
“Your accent’s come back,” he said. “The other one. Maybe the shot was picked up by the other papers. It was in yesterday.”
“The News, that’s it. We get the News. I remember you. But I don’t know who you were.”
Who was he? It was like a charade. “I was the one going to take his computer to California.”
“Jee-zuz. The fine-ancial genous. Sure ’nough.” Simpson took him by the chin, ran a little screw of a flashlight over him, then dropped his hands as if he’d been in the till. Or touched too much money. “Sure ’nough.” He broke suddenly and ran down the block to a trashbasket, pawing there. Funny. To see a policeman run. He never had. “Here you are.”
He saw his own picture the way a savage might—black lines, white space. “There I are.”
“Got any tips on the market?”
“You play?”
“Sure.” Simpson poked a finger in his ribs. “But I’m straight.”
“You know what, you’re a comedy cop. Acting like what you already are.”
Simpson smiled. “Cain’t all be genouses.” He was bright as billboards, and knew it. “What’s it like to be one of those anyway? C’mon, give.”
He considered. “You can’t see too much too young. It’s un-American.”
Simpson spun the flash over him again. “You on anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“What you really come up here for?”
“A girl.”
“Girl, huh. Yeah, you said that. Gimme it again. Name of?”
It came to him like a tip. From the weather man.
“Jasmin,” he said.
When he wouldn’t say any more, Simpson hailed a cab, and told him to get the hell hell out of the neighborhood. Where should he tell the cabbie to go? “One Chase Manhattan Plaza, pal, and see that he gets there. He got the fare.” He leaned in at the window. “Jesus. Why don’t you just drive a cab.”
When he paid off, at the curb, the cabbie himself was worried. “There’s nobody here.”
Then why worry? “It’s all right. I know the night watchman here. Just going to say goodbye to him.”
The cab drove off before he heard the oddness of his excuse. Should at least have said it was to say hello.
He passed the Dubuffet, which was still frogging it. Nobody here but us animals. The repetitions of the night had begun to get him, as in the worst dreams. But also, like the repetitive rhythms of his own body, which, chewing its way between excess and evenness, was only intent on telling him how to live with it. Maybe he was being taught the rhythms between life and dream—while he was awake and sane, and shivering.
Upstairs, he walked the periphery of the office. Ending up as always.
Well, old Batface, what’s for winter? Don’t tell me. The prospect from One Chase at night is pretty overwhelming still. That river, the dark towers of World Trade, the gaps of earth where the raw-siena oxide reminds any building here of its mortality. Or those one or two Revolutionary structures down there, which remind the country of its birth. Whose only dissidence now is that they are wood. Between them and me, an early-century Artemis, no longer gilded, or seen from below. Money is architecture is time … The clear clouds wait for the armistice still.
I could, you know. I could call up the stewardess. The last night in a place you have been always gets to you. No matter where. No matter if it’s already dawn. And the van is expected, shortly, as all vans are. And early—all the long-distance moving on the planet must begin at eight o’clock. The movers in the best arrangements bringing wrap-cloths of their own device. If necessary a sofa can be moved with a man on it. Or a bedpan with three lightbulbs in it, and a pony-tail switch—there’s always a last minute little something extemporaneous to mock all movings with, even the best.
Now I have a confession to make, Batface. Computers can be lied to, so easily. The lie I told you was maybe a small one. Still I want to correct it. Maybe because I am a man.
Long ago, long before I ever went world-dwarfing in a big way, I did find Ike.
He had gone to Riverside Church, to serve his time as one of the readers, who in continuous round-the-clock succession, were reading aloud in memoriam, from a list of the war dead, whose names were arriving in continuous succession, from Vietnam. He’d been out of high school a year and a half. As he walked through the lower-office regions of this church that was half like an office-building, to the little chapel-place where the reading was being done, he understood the nature of his protest exactly. He was against a rhythm of the world, uselessly. Trying to weave his own bit of religion, in a dark room. Others, it was true, had been before him and would be after, in the same place. But when the scroll was thrust into his hands and he stood before the lectern—had there been dais, he couldn’t recall?—he was as alone as if he stood on the bract of a cloud, up from his own grave, and heaven already behind him. The scroll, about the width of an old pianola-roll, reeled endlessly from his hands and mouth. Was it sacrilege, to pay honor this way?—and why was it more honorable to die than to be saved, to do this?
Ever so often, one of the hat-ladies from another part of this eclectic church nosied in, sniffed out. When his relief person didn’t come, he was asked if he could go on, and went on. He began to hear his own voice as one of the details of the room, in among telephone messages from those who could or couldn’t come, and the steady voice of the girl who was taking them. He must have been five or more names past it, when he heard what he had said. “Isaac Joseph Isaacson.” Yes, there had been a dais. He put the list on the lectern, and stepped down. “It’s all right,” the girl said, smiling at him “your relief is here. He was only waiting for you; he didn’t want to break in.” And up there at the lectern a tall basketball-thin black was already reeling it out. “Funny, yesterday it was all middle-aged mamas, today it’s all guys,
” the girl said. “Can you come the same hours next week?” He couldn’t say—no thanks, I got what I wanted. She had too nice a face. “S-sorry. G-going abroad.” There couldn’t be another such Isaacson, and there hadn’t been—he had checked. The following week, he had gone abroad, on a last-minute two-week deal—he hadn’t liked lying to that girl …
“Isaac Joseph Isaacson,” he said aloud, now, “Trapped on the Meuse. Remember Verdun.”
Be somebody, and they have to hunt you up.
He put his hand on the metal casing in front of him, watching his palmprint breathe there for an instant, then fade.
I want to keep them alive for a while, that’s why I lied to you. Finding them isn’t always the best.
He’d searched his jacket dozens of times for that one postcard she’d sent him, telling himself that it might still lurk somewhere in those seams. Thumbing through those that had. Sometimes he got up in the middle of night, recalling still another crevice—and looked again. But in the underpocket that lasted beneath all lies, the sentence on the card kept itself half safe for him. “How’s the summer soldier?” it said.
He leaned his head against the console, that six-month companion-at-arms. It still had a voice, codeless except to him maybe, but no dream. Alas poor Yorick, is that you, Bronstein? Hang your head on my armor. Let us dwarf the world. O perfect fool.
Dozing against the machine, he spread his arms wide. The computer is the cow. In the steamy morning before the world wakes, I feed you. I lean my head against your flank. But you lied too, you know. You’re not Betts.
Neither is he.
Excuse me, Betts. I beg you the deepest pardon of all—the one we exact of the dead. You know that you can be pushed aside.
Excuse me all.
EOF. END OF FILE
He woke from a dream of heights. He often thought of the console in front of him there as a window. And when standing at a window, of the console, he got up. Fenestrate, Bronstein, that’s your kick.
As he was waiting there—for a sign like in the old folklore or a judgment of lightning to streak his sky—was that it?—he saw what at first he thought was a dog running down the street, only to circle the Plaza, and reappear. To see a dog run foaming down the street, from more than thirty stories up, and wonder whether it was a man really, and in the split-second after, know it was a man—what was wrong with his eyes?
First there was the image received on the retina, and then what the brain did with it. He could walk round this perimeter again, and test both. Inside him, he was afraid that at every view, north-south and south-west, he would see the dog-man, thirty stories down. There was no unobstructed view to the east; even Buddy’s millions hadn’t bought it all.
He decided to go downstairs. In the split-second before closing the door, he reached in again for his backpack, kept ready along with his keys. In the second after closing the door, he found he’d left the keys. In front of old Batface, like an offering. Down the elevator he went, one of his ears opening as it always did—down the stairs of his mind, meanwhile.
When he got outside, he saw what looked like a bundle, far down the edge of the plaza. He was afraid of visions, but went toward it, screwing up his eyes. The four-thirty dawn rose like a mechanism of pewter planes and cubist shadows. These days, did you have to see all the galleries to understand the physical world?
Dog or man, or even child, the bundle far down the street was still moving. It was what a soul on legs or a legless beggar-on-wheels might be, humped or curved, rolling about the world in rags or shadows, with morning light about to stream down on where the crown of the head should be—if that was a head, and illumine the chin with dusty human contours—if that was a chin. Souls ran along the streets like Easter-eggs or stones, in all guises.
When the clout came from behind him, he was ready. Everybody in the city was, of course, but this particular clout was for him. As he sank, running on a few steps with the blow, his jaw wide, his last thought was of someone thirty stories up, and looking down on him, wondering whether he was a dog or a man.
He woke to the smell of whales. Harbor-gut. He could almost see them though on the waterfront, in from the Narrows on their way to the Kill Van Kull to be etched on ivory. Or beached and gaping, their jellied insides being visited by men in stovepipe hats. There was something very American about them—or about thinking that there was. Mother Russia, Uncle Sam—a dog-man was a citizen of more. Someone coming out of the coffee shop nudged him with a toe. He felt for his wallet—gone of course—he had been followed. He was down in the gutter, dirty, and not ashamed of it.
He felt for his stutter. His most intimate possession. For the moment he felt cleaned out. Time would have to tell whether he had lost it for good. Or another person. Takes two to stutter, doesn’t it, Jasmin said in her teasing bed-voice. Like tango-ing. He got up from the curb, feeling his head. On the crown of it, a little cockscomb had risen, a thin ridge to the thumb, full of young tenderness. His ideals, maybe. Seemed as likely he would go back to the office now, as that he wouldn’t. Rolling along the street in his soul-curve, he and the street would have to decide. As he limped along, he could see his early-morning self flitting from store window to window. The purple glasses were gone. His vision was 20–20 now, as the oculist had sworn it would be. He was Batface, had been all along. Bunty to Quentin, Batface to Eagle Eye, one plane ticket would carry them all. He was so hungry-healthy he could eat a whale now, imagine it later.
But down-under and blocks away, the Flying Tiger van must already be rolling onto its platform. Might already be loading, the crew of three gone upstairs with their dolly and embalming-cloths, the driver sitting in the cab, a two-sided metal-man, faithful as a toy. He knew van-handlers; how they liked to be finished at three, home with the feet up to a beer, in a house or a garden often described—hernia at fifty, arthritis at sixty, but afternoons free. How any man might need to make his life visible in the most ordinary way, to allow for the unearthly that must creep in.
In the theatre of the invisible—Buddy now said to him—there is never any want of space.
He stopped in his tracks. Not to hurry, kid. In part, you are now what the dead make you say.
The long van had already loaded. Traveling like a behemoth with its mouth open, it had snapped up this last cud. He peered in, and saw it, shrouded. Nobody sick in the back. A good outfit, the Flying Tiger of Newark. He’d chosen it out of the phone book, second try after Cherokee, which had turned out to be more of an airline. Knowing plain enough why the Indian name called to him; why animals kept floating into his head, he couldn’t say. Two by two or alone, taking up what appeared to be their accustomed places. Or else in silent congress, paws uplifted, leaving him to make the analogy. Maybe it was because they were out of time. Or were his luck.
He heard the crew grumbling at the wait. Boss must be soft in the head—a passenger. What kind of freight was that?
One of the crew rubbed two fingers against a thumb, under the speaker’s nose.
No, he’d booked at a price, but without bribes. That had been attended to long since.
He went up to the crew. “Waiting for somebody?” Van-men would talk to anybody except the people in the house they were moving from.
“Yeah, some wook, has to go along with this bundle.”
“A wook?”
Whether they were hewn and musclebound, or shaky non-unioners off the vino for the day, he always felt secretly allied. Shaggy wagoneers, blunt-headed shunters of space, their heavily mantled shoulders sloping to hindquarters where the rut and the dance was, buffalo.
“He means a wack,” one of them said.
“No, he doesn’t,” a second one said, “he means a kook.”
They all three grinned at him.
“That’s me, I guess. The name is Bronstein.”
They scanned him.
“Musta weighed him double.”
“Use him for a tail pipe.”
“Pop him out of the top, like f
or a Diesel.”
They put him in the cab.
He was glad of it. The vitality of his adventure might surpass anybody’s here, but he didn’t want to go it alone. The Bronsteins were moving again; it was his heritage. Though it was the ports that bothered him, he would settle for the journeys. Abe’s coin had paid for this one, long time a-coming.
Maybe I’m a pioneer, like Babbidge. Maybe I’m a failure, like Betts.
“Where you going, kid?”
“C-California.”
What’s for winter? Summer.
He saw it ahead, beyond Newark, a land of golden roses stiffened to bronze, a tale not quite despised. No one can be a soldier all the time. Not even a soldier. Now and then, I’ll call you all up.
“What you got with you?”
Wrapped like a coffin, or a bomb. Or a birthday-box.
“A p-piano.”
He had his stutter back.
As he skittered along, it sang. The jangle of personality that everybody was, rode along with him—a tinkle of manacle at the wrist, a chain-gang at the anklebone. The song of the first loss, training him. What are we here for, here for, if not to see each others’ lines of force? And see them, see them pitiful. Bunty stood and smiled, and kidded. Quentin beat against doors, and performed. Eagle Eye saw. The postmistresses of Ireland and Wales shook hands-across-the-sea with him. Wander the life-camps of the world, oh freely deferred. Oh perfect fool, you are at the beginning of life. Somewhere the whales still slide by, their spouts perpendicular, American elephants, remembering everything.
We are all going to the lost-and-found, he told them.
Accompanying him in what was like a marriage, Jasmin wept.
About the Author
Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.
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