The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  The freeway roared above us, but the nearby streets were vacant. The people in the cars might as well have been in flying saucers, whistling past stragglers in the desert.

  Don gave the cabbie another ten and said: “Get lost for fifteen minutes. Leave us here and circle around, find yourself a cup of coffee or something.” The cabbie and I exchanged a look that said Coffee? Here? but Don was already out of the cab.

  I got out and the cab rumbled away over the cobblestones and around a corner. The Sufferer didn’t glance at it, just sat like an obedient dog and watched us.

  Don ignored it, or pretended to, and walked over and took a seat on the fender of a wrecked truck. It was getting cold. I thought, stupidly, about the meal we would have been eating, about the movie we would have been watching, on the plane.

  Don took out the pipe again and loaded it with a rock of crack. The wind bent the blue column of flame from his lighter one way, then Don sucked it the other, into the pipe. The Sufferer hurried up like a hunting cat to where Don sat. I stepped back.

  Don curled his shoulder protectively around the pipe and glared back at the alien. “Fuck you want?”

  The Sufferer nudged at his elbow with its hand-like paw.

  “Leave me the fuck alone.”

  “Don, what are you doing? It can’t help it. What are you trying to do, bait it?”

  Don ignored me. He flicked his lighter again, tried to get a hit. The Sufferer jogged his elbow. Don kicked at it. The alien danced back easily out of the way, like a boxer, then stepped back in, trying to square its face with Don’s, trying to look him in the eye.

  Don kicked out again, brushing the Sufferer back, then pocketed the pipe and drew out his gun.

  The alien cocked his head.

  “Hey, Don—”

  Don fired the gun straight into the Sufferer’s chest, and the alien jumped back and fell onto the cobblestones, then got back on its feet and walked in a little circle, shaking its head, blinking its eyes.

  Don said: “Ow, fuck, I think I sprained my arm.”

  “How? What happened?”

  “The gun, man. It bucked back on me. Shit.”

  “You can’t kill it, Don. Everybody knows that. The shots’ll just bring the police.”

  Don looked at me. His expression was dazed and cynical at the same time. “I just wanted to give it a piece of my fuckin’ mind, okay, Paul?”

  “Okay, Don. Now what about going back to the airport?”

  “Nah. We gotta lose this thing.”

  The Sufferer circled back around to where Don sat still holding the gun, kneading his injured forearm with his free hand. The alien sat up like a perky cat and tapped at Don’s jacket pocket, rattling the load of bottles.

  “I guess it just wants to see you get clean, Don. If you get rid of the bottles it’ll leave us alone and we can fly to California.”

  “You believe that shit, Paul? Where’d you read that, Newsweek?”

  “What?”

  “That this thing is like some kind of vice cop? That it wants me to kick?”

  “Isn’t that the idea?” The stuff I’d read about them wasn’t clear on much except that they followed users around, actually.

  “Yeah? Watch this.” Don clicked the safety on the gun and handed it to me, then got out his pipe and loaded it. He braised the rock with flame from the lighter, but this time when he got it glowing he turned it around and offered it to the Sufferer. The alien grasped the pipe in its dexterous paw and stuck the end in its mouth and toked.

  “I think I read about that,” I said, lying. “It’s like an empathy thing. They want to earn your trust.”

  Don just smirked at me, then snatched his pipe away from the Sufferer, who didn’t protest.

  “I’m cold,” I said. “You think that cab is coming back?”

  “Fuck yes,” said Don. “You kidding? We’re a fucking gold mine.” He shook out another rock.

  The Sufferer and I both watched. Suddenly I wanted some. I’d done a lot of uncooked coke with some of my Upper West Side friends the last year of high school, but I’d only smoked rock twice before, with Don each time.

  “Give me a hit, Don,” I said.

  He loaded the pipe and handed it and the lighter to me, ungrudgingly.

  I drew in a hit, and felt the crazy rush of the crack hit me. Like snorting a line of coke while plummeting over the summit of a roller coaster.

  The Sufferer opened its weird, toothless black mouth and leaned towards me, obviously wanting another hit.

  “Maybe the idea is to help run through your stash,” I said. “Help use up your stuff, keep you from O.D.ing. Because their bodies can take it, like the bullets. Doesn’t hurt them.”

  “Maybe they’re just fucking crackheads, Paul.”

  The cab’s reappearance startled me, the sound of its approach masked by the rush of cars overhead. And of course, I was thinking of cops.

  Don took his gun back, jammed it in his waistband, and we got into the back. Don held the door open for the Sufferer. “Might as well get it off the freeway,” he said. “Gonna be with us next place we go either way.” The Sufferer didn’t hesitate to clamber in over our feet and settle down on the floor of the back, pretty much filling the space.

  “Okay, but we need a plan, Donnie.” I heard myself beginning to whine.

  “Where to?” said the cabbie.

  “Back to Manhattan,” said Don. “East, uh, 83rd and, uh, Park.” He turned to me. “Chick I know.”

  “You can’t go back to the city.”

  “Manhattan is a big place, Paul. Ear as Randall and Kaz is concerned, 83rd Street might as well be California.”

  “Don’t talk to me about California. Like you know something about California.”

  “Paul, man, I didn’t say shit about California. I’m just saying we can hide out uptown, figure some shit out, okay? Take care of the Crackhead from Space here, right?”

  “Uptown. New York is a world to you, you don’t know anything but uptown or downtown or Brooklyn. California’s a whole other place, Donnie, you can’t imagine. It’ll be different. The things you’re dealing with here, they don’t have to be—you don’t have to have these issues, Donnie. Randall, uptown, whatever.”

  “Okay, Paul. But I just wanna take care of two things, okay, and then we’ll go, let’s just get rid of the Creature and just move this stuff to some people I know, okay? Get cash for this product, then we’ll go.”

  The Sufferer shifted, stepping on my foot, and looked up at us.

  “Okay.” I was defeated, by the two of them. It was like they were in collusion now. “Just don’t talk about California like it’s Mars, for God’s sake. We’re going there, you’ll see how it is, and then you can tell me what you think. It’ll blow your mind, Donnie, to see how different it can be.”

  “Yeah,” he said, far away.

  We were silent into Manhattan. At 83rd Street and Park Avenue Don paid the cab fare, and we got out. The three of us. The street was full of cars, mainly cabs, actually—nobody up here owned a car—but the sidewalk was dead, except for doormen. In a way Don was right about New York. This was another place. The thought of him selling crack on Park Avenue gave me a quick laugh.

  Don led us into a brightly lit foyer. “Annette Sweeney,” he told the doorman.

  The doorman eyed the Sufferer. “Is she expecting visitors?”

  “Tell her it’s Light.”

  We went up to the ninth floor and found Annette Sweeney’s door. Annette Sweeney lived well—I knew that before we even got inside.

  She opened the door before we could knock. “You can’t just always come up here, Light.”

  “Annette, chill out. I got some stuff for you. If it’s not a good time—”

  Annette baited easily. Don’s hook gave me an idea what they had in common. “No, Light, I’m just saying why don’t you call? Why don’t you ever call me? What do you have?”

  “Just some stuff.” He stepped in. “This my brother.”


  “Hi.” She was staring at the Sufferer. “Light, look.”

  “I know. Forget it.”

  I stepped in, and so did the Sufferer. Like it owned the place.

  “What do you mean? When did this happen?”

  “Shut up, forget it. It’s a temporary thing.”

  “What did you do?”

  Don went past her, left the rest of us in the doorway, and flopped on her couch. The apartment was big and spare, the architectural detail as lush as the outside of the building, the furniture modern, all aluminum and glass.

  “I haven’t seen you for weeks, Annette. What did I do? I did a lot of shit, you want to know it all? I come here and you ask me questions?”

  Annette fazed easily. She tilted her head so that her hair fell, then brushed it away and pursed her lips and said: “Sorry, Light.” I saw a rich girl who thought that when she hung out with my brother she was slumming. And I saw my brother twisting her incredible need around his fingers, and hated them both for a second.

  Then she turned to me and smiled weakly and said: “Hi. I’m Annette . . . I didn’t know Light had a brother,” and I felt immediately guilty for judging. It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful, really striking, with black hair and big black eyes.

  I took her hand. The Sufferer pushed past us, brushing my hip, and leapt onto the couch beside Don. “Yeah, well, he does,” I said. “I’m Paul.”

  “It’s funny, ’cause my brother is staying with me right now. That’s why I was so weird about Light just dropping by.”

  “You got a brother?” said Don, distractedly. He’d pulled all the little bottles out of his pockets and piled them on her rug. The Sufferer just sat upright on the couch and watched him.

  “Yeah. He’s out right now, but he might come back.”

  “That’s cool,” said Don. “We’ll party.”

  “Um, Douglas might not really wanna . . . Jesus, Light.”

  “What?”

  “Well, just—your new friend. And all that stuff.”

  “I guess the two kind of go together,” I said.

  “Very funny,” said Don. “He’s harmless, he’s our—what, mascot. Like Tony the Tiger. Smoke rock—it’s grrrreat!”

  “Doesn’t it freak you out?”

  “Nah.” Don chucked the Sufferer on the chin. “You can’t believe all that shit you hear. It just wants to hang. That’s all they want. Came from space to party with me. You should of seen it following the cab, though—it was like a video game.”

  Annette shook her head, grinning.

  “Hey, Paul, come here for a minute,” said Don, jumping up, nodding his head at the door to the bedroom.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Lemme talk to you for a minute though.”

  We left Annette and the drugs and the Sufferer in the living room, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t talk about this California thing,” Don said in a low voice. “Don’t let Annette hear about us leaving because she’ll fucking flip out if she hears I’m going away and I don’t need that, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, then: “Don?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe we should call Jimmy and Marilla. Let them know you’re okay.”

  “They kicked me out. They don’t care.”

  “Just because they couldn’t let you live there anymore doesn’t mean they don’t worry about you. Just to let them know you’re still alive—”

  “Okay, but later, okay?” He had a distracted expression, one I was beginning to recognize: I want a hit.

  “Okay.”

  Don tapped me on the back and we went back out. The Sufferer had the pipe, but Annette looked like she’d had possession of it recently enough. The room was filled with that sour ozone smell.

  She didn’t ask what we’d been talking about in private. Didn’t even seem to wonder. In general, her self-esteem around my brother seemed kind of low.

  “Here,” said Don, plucking the pipe away from the alien. I knelt down on the carpet with them and accepted the offer. Between Don and Annette and the Sufferer it was seriously questionable whether any of the drugs would get sold—which was fine with me. Whether or not using up Don’s supply was part of the alien’s strategy—assuming the alien had a strategy—didn’t matter. It could be my strategy.

  Annette got up and found her cigarettes and brought one back lit, adding to the haze. Then she brushed her hair back and, seemingly emboldened by the cocaine and nicotine, began talking. “Really, though, Light, you should look out, with this thing hanging around you. I heard about how there are people who’ll beat you up just because you’ve got one of these things following you around. It’s a reactionary thing, like AIDS-bashing, you know, blaming the victim. Also won’t the police, like, search you or something, hassle you, if they see it?”

  “The police know me. They already hassle me. I don’t mean shit to the police. Tony the Tiger doesn’t change that.”

  “It’s just weird, Light.”

  “Of course it’s weird,” said Don. “That’s why we love it, right, Paul? It’s from another dimension, it’s fucking weird, it’s science fiction.” The Sufferer cocked its head at Don as if it was considering his words. Don raised his fists like a boxer. The Sufferer opened its mouth at him, a black O, and its ears, or what I was mistaking for its ears, wrinkled forward. Now that I could see it up close, it really didn’t look so much like a cat. The face was really more human, like the sphinx with a toothless octopus mouth.

  Don waved his hands in its face and said: “Dee-nee dee-nee, dee-nee dee-nee”—Twilight Zone Theme.

  “Well, when’s it going to leave you alone?” She took another rock of crack and stuffed it into the end of an unlit cigarette.

  “I’m gonna lose it,” he said.

  “That’s supposed to be pretty hard, Light. I mean, it’s like an obsession for them.”

  “Would you stop quoting the, whatever, the Geraldo Rivera version, or wherever you got that crap? I said I’m gonna lose it. You can help. We can trap it in your bedroom and I’ll cut out.”

  “I think it can hear you, Don,” I said.

  “That’s so fucking stupid, man. It’s from another planet.”

  Of course we all turned to look at it now. It stared back and then pawed at the pile of bottles on the carpet.

  “Hey, cut it out,” said Don. He reached out to push it away, then winced. “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “You think you could rub my arm? I sprained it or something.” He reached under his sweatshirt and freed himself of the gun, dropping it with a clatter on a little table beside the couch.

  “Uh, sure, Light,” Annette said absently, goggling at the gun. She put her cigarette in her mouth and scooted up beside Don and took his arm in her lap. The Sufferer went on rattling the bottles.

  “What about at the airport?” Don said. “You didn’t think it could understand us then.”

  “I’m wrong, it was just a feeling.”

  “Why’d you have to say that? You creeped me the fuck out.”

  “Airport?” said Annette.

  “Uh, that’s where we had to go to get the stuff,” I said, gesturing at the rug, taking up the burden of covering Don’s slip out of guilt, out of habit.

  “You scored at the airport?”

  Don shrugged at her, and said: “Sure.”

  Annette lit the loaded cigarette. The rock hissed as it hit the flame. “What are you doing with all this?”

  “Well, I really gotta sell some,” said Don. “I was wondering if you wanted to call some of your friends. I don’t wanna go downtown now.”

  “I don’t know, Light.” She looked at the Sufferer, who was still rattling at the vials. “Won’t it narc on us?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Even if it doesn’t, that’s what everybody’ll think if they see it here.”

  “Just set it up, okay? We can arrange something so they don’t have to meet Tony the Tiger.” He lit a rock and to
ked.

  “Well, anyway, my brother is coming back tonight so I don’t think you can deal out of my house, Light.”

  “What does that have to do with it? It’s your house, right?”

  “Well, I don’t know. He’s my older brother.”

  “Paul is my older fucking brother,” Don said. “So what?”

  Maybe Annette’s older brother knows how to take care of his sibling, I thought. Like I obviously don’t.

  There was a sound of a key fumbling in a lock. “Speak of the devil,” said Annette.

  Douglas turned out to be quite a bit older than Annette, or at least the way he dressed and held himself made it seem that way. He came up to where we all were sprawled on the couch and the carpet and said, to me: “Are you Light?”

  “No,” said Don, “that’s me.”

  Douglas’s eyes played over the scene: the gun, the vials, the alien sitting like a giant snake-skinned cougar on the carpet.

  He reached down and picked up the gun.

  “Ann, why don’t you go lock yourself in the bedroom,” he said.

  “Doug-las,” she whined.

  “Do it.”

  “Don’t be a chump,” said Don. “This is her place.”

  “Shut up. I know all about you. We’re going to have a little talk. Go, Ann.”

  “I told you,” Annette said to Don as she got up from the couch. “Uh, nice to meet you, Paul. Sorry.”

  As she slouched her way to the bedroom, the Sufferer jumped up and followed her. Douglas took a step back, startled. I watched the gun. Douglas handled it badly, but I was pretty sure the safety was still in place.

  The Sufferer was suddenly, inexplicably agitated. It ran ahead of her into the bedroom, looked out the far window at the lights of the building across 83rd Street, and back at us.

  “What’s it doing?” said Doug angrily.

  Don shrugged. Annette stood waiting at the doorway.

  “Get it out of there,” said Doug, gesturing with the gun.

  “Hey, that’s not my responsibility,” said Don. “You’re the dude who’s taking charge.”

  The Sufferer wrinkled its ears forward and stared glumly at Don. Don glowered at Douglas.

  “Here,” I said. I went in and pushed at the Sufferer. Its flesh was like a dense black pudding, and it felt like it weighed about a thousand pounds. I tried to prod it towards the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Annette came into the bedroom and tried to help me push, to no avail.