In the Walled City

by Stewart O'Nan

  It was all speculation. He was not going to quit.

  He fell asleep after half a sandwich. The goddamn papers. Why did they always keep the heat on high? The windows weren’t designed to open. As he slogged his way through December and then January, his head grew thicker. He began to sweat, long, cold strings down his ribs. He kept thinking he had the flu, or his sinuses, a head cold, nothing serious. He knew who he was, where he was. He had eaten lunch. Yet none of the names he was transcribing was familiar.

  In his office, he made it through the day, protected by the paperwork. It did not hit him all at once, the way it had before. He even remembered Scott’s name to say good-night to him.

  It was dark, the parking lot gleaming and vague under the high lights. He could not remember where he had parked his car. He checked his jacket pocket. “Lock Office,” one index card read, “Sat Light Odom,” another. He walked down one row and up the next, searching for the friendly bulk of the Imperial. Other staff were leaving. Could someone have stolen it? Or towed, they were always towing around the college. It was a hard car to miss, even at night in a large lot. A line had formed at the exit booths, red snow falling through the taillights and exhaust. Panicked, he went back inside to his office and waited.

  An hour later the lot was practically empty, the few cars snow-covered, none large enough to be the Imperial. The doctor stood outside the clinic’s front doors, looking at his keys. The car key was for a Volkswagen.

  “Interesting,” the doctor said.

  The Volkswagen was, of those left, nearest the doors. The doctor got in and, after stowing his briefcase in back, cranked the motor over, buckled his seatbelt and headed slowly across the lot. At the booth he paid the stranger who knew him and the striped gate rose. The exit emptied onto a side street. Snow had half-hidden the last tracks. He came to a red light. He could go right or left or straight ahead. The light changed. The light changed. The light changed.

  The Legion of Superheroes

  Larsen did not give up on God till well after the divorce, and by then he was seriously collecting comic books. His son Dylan had turned him on to them before he and Carrie broke up. Saturdays they would drive out over the Highland Park Bridge to Etna and spend a few hours at the Pulp Mill, a dusty-windowed storefront crammed with piles of coverless, yellowing treasures.

  In the beginning, Larsen only tolerated his son’s interest, chatting with the owner while Dylan and his friend Roger burrowed through the overflowing stacks. It was still a cheap date then, and after a week of battling Carrie, it was a relief, a soft spot, reliable, gratefully awaited. He and the owner, Ned, watched part of the Pitt game on a tiny portable on the counter in back, once in a while split a tallboy in Flintstone jelly glasses. The place was always freezing and breathed the mildewy garage odor of cat. An overstuffed recliner leaned against the back wall, to one side of it a rickety space heater. Larsen sat, filtering Ned’s gibberish about the Silver Surfer and the House of Mystery, thinking of how Carrie had said —straight-faced, as if he were the insane one —that she would ask the Assembly to pray for him.

  “Go ahead,” he said, knowing it would not work. When Larsen prayed now —for it was a habit impossible to stop —halfway through he quit in disgust, as if trying a number he knew full well had been disconnected. In the Assembly you counted only the years since you’d made the change. His new life had lasted fifteen years. Now he was one again, newborn. Every day he thought about going back, but like the memory of his mother, that world and that life seemed to recede into the heavens while he watched, earthbound. It was strange, he thought, that he would miss something he did not want to remember.

  Ned kept his new arrivals unpriced on a trunk beside the recliner, and out of boredom or desperation once in a while Larsen leafed through them. He remembered some of the older titles —“Action,” “The Flash,” “Tales from the Crypt”—and thought them superior to the new ones. They were supposed to be an investment. Why not, he thought.

  “‘Superman,’” Dylan said, appraising the cover through the plastic protector. “Good choice, Dad; very practical.”

  He went to the library for price catalogues, every Saturday talked shop with Ned.

  “How much?” Carrie would ask before they even had a chance to unpack.

  At first Larsen would tell her straight out. After a few months he began to hedge, then outright lie. The last year he’d say, “Don’t you worry about it.” By then Dylan no longer came in with him, just gave him his bag and ran off to play softball or street hockey until it was safe to slip in the back.

  Now Saturday was officially Larsen’s day with Dylan. The Pulp Mill was a beer can collectors’ store, Roger had moved with his grandmother to Florida, and Larsen’s marriage was ugly history. He had left the Assembly while Carrie had plunged further into it, and alone began to feel the dizzying emptiness of being without family. Only his mother’s death, long forgotten, safely buried those faithful years, kept him company.

  A month ago, despondent after talking on the phone with Dylan, Larsen had tried to kill himself. It was his birthday. He’d bought a day-old cake at the supermarket and topped it with a candle in the shape of the number one. He decorated the top and then the sides with Xanax, pushing the pills into the icing. He opened a quart of milk and sat down and ate the whole thing.

  It was foolish, a mistake he realized immediately, whipping the empty vial across the kitchenette. He careened through the apartment to the phone.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he told the operator. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

  “Nearest cross street?” she said.

  The police had called Carrie. She was helpful, if pitiless. Since the attempt, he hadn’t seen Dylan.

  This Saturday, Larsen was looking for the “Legion of Superheroes” #247, with the origin of the X-Men. The issue would complete his run, and he was prepared to lay out twenty dollars for it. The market was soft; he was hoping to find it cheap at the weekend show out at the Monroeville Sheraton. Driving over, he thought that if he was lucky enough to find a copy, he’d pay whatever the dealer asked. He was early, and stopped at the Rite-Aid for a coffee to waste time.

  Carrie let him in. She was made-up, in a skirt and blouse that made him regret his jeans. She punished him with silence. It was foolish, he thought.

  “How are things?” he asked. “You look good.”

  “I’ll get him,” she said, and went upstairs. He stood in the front hall with his coat zipped to the neck. The new antidepressants gave him the chills. The house hadn’t changed, the walls, nothing. A slight vertigo always hit him here, as if he’d been gone for years. He was still paying the mortgage, though Carrie was working full time now at Pitt.

  She hadn’t looked good, it was just something to say. If the house felt strange in its familiarity, his wife seemed a stranger, unknown and unknowable —as if possessed. It had not been a case, as Larsen first thought, of him and Carrie drifting apart, but the sudden realization on his part that he was living with a crazy woman. Not that he hadn’t been taken by religion —and its absence —at times in his life. His mother, before she killed herself, was a devout Lutheran who throughout the sixties clung to her faith like a weapon. A believer, he never blamed God for her death, rather asked his forgiveness, prayed he would not end up the same way. It ran in the family. The Assembly was all he had until he met Carrie. Jesus freaks, her family called them, but as the years and jobs came and went, Larsen’s relationship with God grew more comfortable, like a favorite chair. The first signs of the problem seemed tricks of his imagination. How long had Carrie been answering him in parables? Did she ever compare her underlined bibles, or just shelve one and start another? He began to spy on her, to go through her things, and the more he found the odder she seemed. Yet he knew he had once been that way. He just could not imagine it.

  Carrie said it was natural to waver, that from doubt grew faith; despair, hope. But Larsen was not in doubt, and despair was still a good ways o
ff. He felt he had just woken up. She thought he was going mad. They liked to fight in the kitchen, the winner holding their ground, the loser stomping upstairs or, in the rare bout of true rage, out the back door. Sometimes, faced with the night, the sky glowing demonically over the Homestead Works, Larsen would slam the flimsy door of their new Nova and screech down the street for the neighbors to hear (which, ashamed of his own boldness, he immediately regretted), ending up parked on a nearby street, sucking a Slurpee dry, envisioning himself alone in an unfurnished apartment. Until one day it had come to that. Still, that first night among his boxes, the bare walls had surprised him.

  Dylan came down ready to go. He had on a Steeler jacket with cracked leather arms, his hands jammed in the pockets. He was a small fourteen, and recently he’d become sullen. October, Carrie said she’d smelled smoke in his hair. When Larsen asked him, Dylan denied it, but halfheartedly, as if he didn’t care what he believed —or worse, as if Larsen wasn’t really interested. Larsen trusted it was typical, feared it was personal.

  Dylan escaped to the porch.

  “Please be back by four,” Carrie said.

  “Dinner somewhere?” Larsen asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll have him back.”

  She closed the door behind him. Dylan was waiting by the Nova. It looked like it might snow, might not.

  Larsen kept the radio on so they wouldn’t have to talk. The Pitt game murmured. Dylan slouched against the door, his hair fogging the window.

  “So what’s up?” Larsen asked at a light.

  “Everything. Mom.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s going out with this guy tonight.”

  “Really. How about you?”

  “I’m going over to Jimmy’s. His mom’s going to rent some Nintendo. Pretty basic.”

  “Who’s this guy?”

  “Someone from Pitt, I don’t know. They’re going some nice place over Mount Washington, one of those places with the view.”

  “Must be rich,” Larsen asked.

  “He’s like a professor, I think. Mom’s in this bible group with him. She’s always talking about him saying this and that and isn’t that interesting and stuff. He’s not too bad, I guess. I don’t know.” They were going through Squirrel Hill, past the kosher meat markets and sooty old newsstands. “So what’s the plan, the Sheraton?”

  “It’s up to you,” Larsen said.

  “What else is there to do?”

  “I don’t know, use your imagination.”

  “No,” his son said, “let’s just go to the Sheraton.”

  Larsen swung onto the Parkway East, onto 22 with the mall traffic. It was the way he took to work in the morning, against the rush hour. He was installing boxes for Allegheny Cable. It was boring and paid well. He drifted through other people’s homes, ignored, invisible. The company gave him a portable phone so that when the box was all hooked up he could call in and have them activate everything. Every Friday he was going to quit; he was surprised he hadn’t yet.

  “Dad?” Dylan said. “Mom told me not to tell you about the guy.”

  “I might get jealous.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s fine. I think it’s good. Your mother needs something like that. What do you think?”

  “Sure,” Dylan said. “I mean, you’re OK now.”

  “I am,” Larsen said, and looked over to show him it was true. The boy didn’t seem convinced. “What has your mother told you?”

  “Nothing. That you were sick.”

  “I was.”

  “Like in the head sick.”

  “That’s debatable,” Larsen said, but only he laughed.

  “She’s always saying stuff like that. I just forget it.”

  “In this case she was telling the truth. Or I don’t know, what did she say?”

  “She said you took a bunch of pills.”

  “I did,” Larsen said. An identical white Nova passed going the other way. “I was very confused about a lot of things.”

  “It wasn’t because I forgot your birthday.”

  “Did your mother tell you it was?”

  “No. I just remembered after and thought —I don’t know, you know.”

  “It was a lot of things. I really should be able to explain it, shouldn’t I?” The boy was looking at him, unsure. “You don’t really want to go to the comic book thing.”

  “Not really.”

  “How about lunch then? We’ll go somewhere you want.”

  “OK,” Dylan said, seeming pleased. “How about Beefsteak Charlie’s, they have all-you-can-eat ribs.”

  “Good,” Larsen said, “I like ribs.”

  The restaurant was part of a chain. It was done in a hokey turn-of-the-century motif, the wallpaper a sepia collage of elevated trains and patent medicine ads, ten-point headlines over illegible type. The host wore a red-and-white striped shirt under a vest and a fake handlebar mustache.

  “Nonsmoking,” Larsen said.

  The menu matched the walls. Larsen ordered the ribs and a beer; Dylan looked at him hopefully.

  “Next year,” Larsen said.

  They drank their ice water and talked about the Steelers and Dylan’s school. Larsen always marveled at how his own mother hid in his son’s face, and for a few seconds he was so much in love he didn’t hear what Dylan was saying. She had used their car, duct-taped the garden hose to the pipe, and pinched it in the window. The day guard found it on the top floor of the parking garage, facing dawn, the tank empty. A gray woman in a hand-knit sweater, buckled upright. Why did he think he could have saved her?

  Muzak dixieland and the clank of silverware returned. Dylan was saying something about a girl. Larsen wanted to reach across the table and hold him and tell him he was the only reason he had not laid down in the kitchenette and died, that in that instant when the pills were a knife in his stomach, he had stopped and thought of a moment just like this that he would never see. It was a lie, and the beer coming saved him.

  The ribs were fatty, the sauce bland, and the coleslaw came in a pleated paper cup.

  “There was this guy at school,” Dylan said, and tore off a bite. “Mr. Whaley, our health teacher. He fell in love with this girl in our class named Megan Saunders, and the police arrested him trying to jump off the Panther Hollow Bridge.”

  “I read about that.”

  “He was a jerk so it didn’t really matter.” He stopped in mid-chew, as if he’d bit his tongue.

  “I understand,” Larsen said.

  “I didn’t mean it to sound mean.”

  “That’s all right. Another rack?”

  “Sure,” his son said.

  Larsen had a second beer and would have had another if he weren’t with Dylan. They sat stuffed, groaning over the bones.

  “Is this better than the Sheraton?” Larsen asked.

  “I guess. I’m not that into comics anymore.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I was thinking I might sell my collection.”

  Larsen reached for his mug but it was dry. Their waiter had disappeared, probably in back having a smoke. “I’d wait. Prices are down right now.” Dylan half-turned away, not listening, and Larsen suddenly felt stupid for pinning his hopes on something so flimsy. “If you need help, I can give you an appraisal. I might even be interested in it myself.”

  “Can you come over next week?”

  “Pick a night,” Larsen said. “As long as you clear it with your mother.”

  “How much do you think I can get for it?”

  Not as much as it’s worth, Larsen thought, but answered, “I don’t know, a lot.”

  On the way home, Larsen realized it had been snowing since they left the lot. He could not remember turning his wipers on. Pitt was losing big; Dylan fiddled with the knob.

  Carrie was surprised to see them back so early. Dylan took him up to his room to have a quick look at the collection. The room had changed, the paint, the light fixture. A gray metal desk he
had never seen took up one corner, above it, instead of the Human Torch, a poster of a white Lamborghini. Dylan was pulling out rare issues he had priced from a guide —”Fantastic Four” #1, “Doctor Strange” #1, “Daredevil” #1—all of which Larsen had helped buy, Saturday after Saturday.

  “We’ll have to put a list together,” he said.

  “I’ve got one,” Dylan said, and pulled it out of the desk. The prices were current, the total more than Larsen was worth. All his son wanted, it seemed, was his permission.

  “I’ll check these against what people are actually paying,” he said, as if doubtful, and folded the list into a pocket. They stumbled through their good-bye.

  Downstairs, as he was tugging on his gloves, Carrie asked if Dylan had asked about what had happened. She only mentioned it because he’d asked her and she’d had to sit down with him.

  “I was honest with him,” Larsen said, not knowing what it meant. “Have a nice dinner.”

  “I will,” she said.

  He drove out to the Sheraton, and after searching until his eyes hurt, found a good (not very good but better than fair, the cover in one piece) copy of the “Legion of Superheroes” #247. He paid the woman fifteen dollars, and with the five he saved bought dinner at a Wendy’s. He recognized the girl at the drive-in window; on the way home, he promised himself he would do some real food shopping tomorrow.

  He ate his sour burger in silence, then washed and dried his hands before slipping the comic into its plastic cover and taping it shut. He slid it into the bookshelf and stood back to marvel at the complete run. Outside, a car screeched, jerking him upright, but there was no impact. Plastic covers. Was this something to give his life to?

  He remembered waking up on the floor, unaware that it was a tube down his throat choking him, that the hand smothering him held an oxygen mask. A white form glowed over him, and all he knew was that he was tired, that he was ready, even if he didn’t believe, to go with this angel.