by A. C. Fuller
Mirna was thin, her face wrinkled but bright, and her silver-gray hair was pinned up in a beehive style. She turned and shouted back to the kitchen. “Bacon and Brie burger, rare. Sweet potato fries. Roasted garlic aioli.” She turned to Camila. “You’re here late tonight. Been crying again?” she asked in a harsh but motherly voice.
“Guess,” Camila croaked across the diner.
“About Martin or your dad, or something else?”
“At this point I’m not even sure anymore.”
“Drink?”
“At least one.”
Mirna grabbed a shaker from the bar behind the counter, added a shot of gin, a dash of simple syrup, a splash of lemon juice, and a scoop of ice. She shook it hard. “You know, the boys in the kitchen talk about you,” she said. “Couple days ago, Fernando said, ‘How can someone so beautiful and so smart be so sad?’” She poured the mixture into a champagne flute and topped it off with champagne before garnishing it with a lemon rind.
Smiling, she approached Camila then set down the drink. “I told him I had no idea.”
Camila took a long sip and looked up at Mirna, but said nothing.
“I’ve worked here forty years,” Mirna said, “and you’re the only person who’s ever ordered a French 75.”
“You want to know why I started drinking them?”
“Okay, but talk loud, I gotta wipe down bottles.” Mirna turned and started pulling ketchup and mustard bottles off empty tables, running them through a wet rag and replacing them.
“We’re all about the glamour, huh?” Camilla smiled. “Two girls living the dream in New York City.”
“You know it.”
After dropping the lemon rind into the drink, Camila took a long sip, then turned toward Mirna. “When I was in my twenties, before grad school, I lived in Paris for a year. I thought I was going to be a philosopher.”
Mirna smiled. “When I was in my twenties, I thought I was going to be Marilyn Monroe. You know, I slept with Joe DiMaggio before she did.”
Camila laughed. “I’ll bet you did.”
“If I looked like you, you know what a good time I’d be having?”
“I’m not going to become a Derek Jeter groupie, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“Wouldn’t hurt you to have a little fun.” Mirna set down a saltshaker and looked back. “Have you been with anyone since John died?”
Camila shook her head and sipped. “Do you want to hear why I drink this silly thing or not?”
“Shoot.”
“I lived in Paris for a year and I’d stay up all night in cafés, reading the French philosophers and psychoanalysts—Derrida, Lacan. I wanted to be hip, French, something different. And I was a little self-involved.”
Mirna smirked. “You don’t say.”
Camila tossed a napkin at her. “Hey, leave me alone. I’m fragile right now. Anyway, I wanted a drink that sounded cool and no one else drank, so I started drinking French 75s.”
“And now that you’ve stopped trying to be cool, why are you still drinking them?”
Camila finished the drink in one long sip. “It’s like drinking a glass of joy, bitterness, and fire.”
A man shouted from the kitchen. “Burger’s up!”
Camila raised her glass. “And I’ll take another one of these, please.”
Mirna retrieved the burger from the window and set it in front of Camila. “You’re gonna eat that whole thing, huh?”
“Damn right,” Camila said. “I need to refuel so I can go home and cry some more.”
Chapter 11
Alex took Greta’s hand and walked on. At 90th, they stopped at the window of a small grocery store.
“Lots of energy in fruit,” Greta said.
Alex looked back and saw the man standing next to a pay phone a half block behind them.
“What’s wrong?” Greta asked.
“Nothing,” he said, nudging her and continuing up the street. “I think I need a coffee for the walk home.”
They stopped at the Starbucks on the corner and stood in line. Alex looked out the window. After a moment, the man appeared under a streetlight. He wore a puffy black jacket and his curly black hair peeked out from under its hood. Alex thought he recognized him. The man glanced inside, then looked away and lit a cigarette.
Greta didn’t want anything, so when they reached the register Alex just ordered a small coffee for himself. While they waited, he turned back to the window.
The man’s face was pressed against the glass. He had a yellow and red bird tattooed on the left side of his neck and his wild green eyes were fixed on Alex. Frozen, Alex held his gaze. He thought of the call from earlier in the day. This was real.
“Two dollars and nine cents, please.”
Alex turned around and the barista handed him his coffee.
“Why not two dollars even?” he asked, trying to sound confident. He handed her three dollars. “Right now, there are probably ten thousand Starbucks employees counting out ninety-one cents and handing it to guys like me.”
“Most people just drop it in the tip jar,” she replied, unimpressed.
“But that’s a 45 percent tip,” Alex said, smiling.
Greta gave his arm a gentle tug toward the door. He dropped the money in the jar and looked back toward the window. The man was gone.
Alex looked both ways as they stepped out onto the sidewalk. No man. He took Greta’s hand and they walked north. Every few minutes, Alex glanced back into the shadows, trying to remember John 12:25.
Chapter 12
Friday, September 6, 2002
Alex read his story on the Santiago trial standing in front of the NYU journalism building, a fifteen-story stone tower a few doors up from Washington Square Park. The sun was still behind the buildings and a thin fog hung in the air. He thought of all the people across the city reading his story. Ten million people in the five boroughs, three-hundred thousand of whom bought The Standard each day, including home delivery. Probably only half of them looked at the front page, and maybe half of those actually read it. Seventy-five thousand readers. In an eighteen-hour day, about four thousand readers per hour, about seventy every minute. And that wasn’t even counting the web edition.
When Camila stepped out of the taxi, her eyes looked puffy and her hair was even more disheveled than it had been the day before. As she walked past Alex into the journalism building, he slung his laptop bag over his shoulder and followed her in, careful to stay a few yards back.
Nearing the front of the elevator line, Alex saw a sleepy-looking security guard checking IDs as the students filed past him. When he was a student at NYU, they hadn’t had security. “Checking IDs?” he asked when he reached the front, smiling and looking straight at the security guard.
“They got us doin’ it ever since 9/11. Gotta be safe, I guess. Students and employees only.”
Alex noticed that the students were just flashing their IDs at the man as he waved them through. “I’m neither,” he said. “Here as a guest speaker in Professor Gray’s class. I should be on the list. Fourth floor, right?”
“Sixth floor. All journalism classes are on six.”
Alex waved his New York Standard ID under the man’s nose. “That’s right, sixth. She has me here to talk about the case of the murdered professor from last year. You know the one?”
“Sure, I know the case. It’s huuuuuge around here. Everybody’s talking about that Santiago kid. I used to do security for his baseball games. He was a shortstop, right?”
Alex was inching toward the elevator. “That’s right.”
The guard waved him through. “Head on up.”
Alex rode the elevator to the sixth floor and walked down the hallway. He saw her through the window of a theater-style lecture hall filled with about three hundred seats. He filed in with the students and took a seat in a crowded section near the back.
Camila stood on a large stage at the front of the room fiddling with a laptop and projector. W
hen she plugged in the laptop, an image appeared on the screen behind her: a generic-looking man in the center, surrounded by the logos of Microsoft, Yahoo, Hotmail, CNN, and The New York Times. Above the logos, in large text, Alex read: “Communications 235: Media and Identity in the Digital Age.”
Camila looked out from behind the lectern as students pulled out notebooks and laptops. She looked tired, but her face lit up as she began to speak.
“How many of you are journalism majors?” she asked. Most of the hands in the room went up. “And how many of you plan to work in the media in some capacity?” Most of the raised hands stayed up. “Why is that? I mean, why do you want to work in the media? You.” She pointed at a tall boy in the front row.
“Uh, I don’t know. What’s that quote? ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant,’ or something like that? Journalism can be like a light shining onto the parts of the world we miss. Exposing things we don’t see.”
“Good. That’s good. Journalism is a noble endeavor. But I should tell you now that most of the media has nothing to do with journalism, and most journalism has little to do with reality. At its best, journalism is a skewed reflection of a tiny piece of reality.” Camila paced the stage. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. But when we start confusing the media with reality, we run into some serious problems. ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss.’ Anyone know where that’s from?” She scanned the room. Alex caught himself pulling a thin reporter’s notebook out of his back pocket. He had sat in classrooms like this almost every day during his four years at NYU. The habit had come right back. “It’s Nabokov. It ends, ‘And common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ If that’s true, then we live in the center of that crack of light.”
The class had settled down. Alex was mesmerized.
“We live in the center of a national tornado called the media, and those of us in this room, in Manhattan, live in the eye of the storm. We can’t see it, but it’s whirling around us all the time, shaping our thoughts and experiences. It’s an exciting time to be here, even if there is darkness on both sides. All the information we want is right here in this hunk of metal and silicon.” She patted her laptop. “We are beginning to exist in the digital world. And even though we are the ones creating that world, we don’t yet know what it is. We don’t know what we’re creating.
“When I was a little girl, I lived on a small street in Iowa. Neighbors. A palpable context. A world in which to live. A world that shaped and defined me. Now there is no world, no context, even for those still living on small streets. We are all trying to create worlds out of the endless stream of information—the images, words and sounds that go by on screens.” She paused. “Is it working?
“There is a loneliness when we stare at the screen, right? And the loneliness becomes heartache when we realize that the screen has nothing to tell us. But it’s not the screen’s fault we feel so disconnected. It’s not its fault that it’s not human. It’s our fault that we’re not human. At least not as human as we’re meant to be.”
Just then a young man walked in with a huge stack of papers. “Ms. Gray, the syllabi.”
Alex watched dozens of shoulders relax in front of him.
“Ok, class, enough of that,” Camila said. “This is Greg, the TA. He will be handing out the syllabi. Welcome to Media and Identity in the Digital Age.”
An hour later, Camila dismissed the class. Alex stayed in his seat and watched her chat with a few stragglers. Her formal demeanor was gone and she looked young enough to be a grad student. He wanted to approach her but felt stuck. What the hell? Why didn’t he just talk to her?
He stood as the last of the students left, but something caught his eye through the window in the top half of the door. A bright bird on an ashy black neck. Then it was gone. Alex stared at the window a moment longer, then looked toward the door, both hoping and fearing that he would see the man again.
“Can I help you?” Camila stood in front of him.
“Um . . . I . . . ” Alex’s eyes darted back and forth between the doorway and her face, which appeared to be acutely focused on him, while at the same time relaxed, even soft.
“Do you have any questions about the syllabus?”
“No, I just . . . ” He glanced at the window; the man was back.
“I gotta go,” he muttered, jogging past Camila and into the crowded hallway.
The man ducked his head and disappeared down the staircase next to the elevators. Alex fought through a swarm of oncoming students and bounded down the stairs two at a time. “Wait!” he called, still about a flight behind the tall, lanky frame moving awkwardly down the stairs.
Alex caught up to him on the second floor. When the man moved to the inside of the staircase to evade a group of students, Alex grabbed at his shoulder. The man lost his footing, then stumbled down the final few steps.
Alex took him by the arm and pulled him down the last flight of stairs and out into the street. The fog had burned off now and the sun was peeking over the buildings with a sharp, raw light. Alex squinted and looked at the ground, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
As he brought his eyes up he saw the gun.
Chapter 13
After class, Camila returned to her office, a small room with brick walls and books stacked to the low ceilings. She locked the door, sat at her old metal desk, and stared at the wall. The bricks were painted white and the more she watched them the more they seemed to move. The grout lines between the bricks waved and pulsed as her mind softened. The wall took on a glow, then began to shimmer as her eyes relaxed. Every few moments, the strangeness of this overcame her and she shifted her head and focused her gaze, which reestablished her mind.
After a few minutes of this, she closed her eyes and saw John Martin. He was standing in her apartment—shoulders slumped, tears in his eyes—three weeks before he died. She did not like this memory of him. She stood and opened a small window that looked onto Fourth Street. The day was warm and hazy. It was going to rain. Students came and went and delivery trucks double-parked. Taxis honked behind them.
Leaning out the window, she closed her eyes and saw him again.
“We can’t have a baby,” she had said to him. The heater had been stuck on high for days and they’d propped the window open, so an occasional snowflake had drifted into their conversation and then melted in midair.
“Why not?” Martin asked.
“I love you, but we’re too old.”
“You mean I’m too old.”
She sat on the couch, not looking at him. “Look at us,” she said. “How are the two of us going to raise a baby? We’re both solitary intellectuals.”
“Camila, this is my last chance. I didn’t think I’d find anyone I’d want to have another child with, but I did.” He sat down next to her and his chin dropped to his chest as he pulled at a loose thread on the white longshoreman’s cap in his lap. “And I thought you said you liked older men.”
She stared at him with pity, then sadness. She was able to imagine his parents from the stiff wrinkles on his forehead—their neglect, their depression, their anger. They had filled him with fear. He looked like a little boy, shocked by an external force until the life in him just stopped. He had walled off enough of his mind to be brilliant on occasion, but his strength and vibrancy were gone.
“You said I make you feel safe,” he continued. “I know how your father was. I would never hit a child.”
Camila knew he would be a good father. She had met his daughter a couple of times, and she had turned out okay. He would try his best and he would never be violent. But he was weak. Too weak and too broken.
The snow started coming down hard and she walked to the window and watched it mound on the cars below.
“I’m fifty years old, Cam. I have enough money. Even if you don’t want to stay with me, I want to have a baby with you.”
He had smiled as she’d looked at him. Turning away, she’d lean
ed out the window and caught some snow in her hand. “I never said I liked older men,” she had said, watching the snow melt in the white-gray light. “I said I tend to choose safe men. Some of them have been older. I love you, but I don’t want to do that anymore. I can’t do this anymore. I want to feel okay enough to be in a relationship that isn’t just safe.”
Her cell phone rang and she opened her eyes. She moved to her desk, glanced at the caller ID, and paced her office, trying to relax. She had to answer this time. On the fifth ring, she did.
“Mama? Yeah, I’m fine . . . I should have called you back . . . I know . . . And there’s nothing else they can do? How long did the doctor say he might . . . Okay . . . I can’t just leave in the first week of the semester . . . Okay . . . Right . . . I’ll see if I can come . . . Bye, Mama . . . Yeah, love you, too.”
She put the phone down and looked back at the wall, staring until her vision blurred and the bricks morphed into a colorful fog.
Chapter 14
“Demarcus Downton,” the man said. He had a Brooklyn accent mixed with something else Alex couldn’t quite place. They had crossed the street and were sitting in a small coffee shop where Alex felt safe.
“How’d you get upstairs?” Alex asked.
“Known the security guard for a long while.”
“Why the gun? I saw it in your belt.”
“It’s not for you. Plus, you the one threw me down the stairs.”
“Sorry about that,” Alex said. “How’s your head?”
“Had worse.”
Alex believed him. His face was more than thin—concave almost, and scarred. His dark green eyes looked tired. In addition to the bright bird on his neck, Downton had a fading Tweety Bird tattooed on his left forearm. On his right wrist, the number 76845 in blocky lettering. But despite Downton’s ragged appearance, the more Alex studied his face, the safer he felt.
