City on Fire (19 page)

Aboveground, the snow had started falling again. Trees on the lawn of the Natural History museum, which apparently was right here, were ensnared in ceramic bulbs, and in the red and blue and orange balls of light around them he could see it was coming down fat and at an angle. A solitary bus shooshed past as the traffic signals went green. Amazing, how quiet the city could get here, between the high buildings and the wilderness of the park.

She’d said the benches by the subway exit, and Charlie, unable to keep track of the lies he’d told about his Manhattan savvy, had acted like he knew what she was talking about. And now here was a mile of benches stretching away in either direction from Eighty-First Street, along the granite wall that bordered the park, and no sign of Sam, which meant that it could be earlier than midnight and she hadn’t come yet, or later, and she’d given up. Or that she’d said Seventy-Second instead of Eighty-First, which—crap—she definitely had.

It took him a minute to figure out which way was south. He moved at a trot, peering into the snow for the faintest silhouette up ahead. His boots crunched under him. The park on his left was forbiddingly black, and it was a well-known fact that after dark it belonged to muggers and dope fiends and fags. Stories of the decaying City had reached even unto Long Island. On the other hand, the movement was jostling the contents of his bladder, and if he didn’t pee soon, he was going to like rupture. He was coming up on a break in the wall. With no sign of Sam, he steeled himself and plunged through it, under the trees.

He had stepped off the path and was maybe a second from getting his fly open when a voice made him stop: a single syllable that seemed to come first off the stone wall and then off the path, and then to gallop off uselessly through the underlit underbrush. “Help,” is what it said. In the silence that followed, he became aware of his own breath, the wind gusting, the fierce bleat of blood in his ears. Perhaps in his agitation, he’d mistaken one of these sounds, or some mixture of them all, for the vox humana. He stepped farther away from the path. There was a steady ache now in the region just behind his beltbuckle; systems of hydraulic tubes and reservoirs whose names he’d failed to learn in first-period Bio were asserting their demands: if he didn’t relieve the pressure right now … but before he could cross the five or so feet that would have guaranteed his privacy, it came again. “Help!” And now, much dismayed, he found himself back on the path, lurching out of the circle of light, in the direction of what had registered at bone level as a kind of call to arms.

An unlikely respondent, Charlie Weisbarger, battling the winter-bare branches, slipping over slick spots where feet had trod snow into ice. Still, he was helpless not to imagine himself coming to the rescue of this person who had called out. Male, by the sound of it, maybe cornered by a mugger, or maybe, if Charlie was lucky and the incident was already over, needing help only to call the police. He would emerge from the park a hero. Sam, waiting under a streetlight, would throw her arms around his neck.

The pattern of footprints on the gray-white path grew more involved, then less. There was no third cry; he was beginning to think he’d overshot his mark, or imagined the whole thing, when he heard quick steps coming up behind him. He looked back and found the path empty. Except. Except behind the flanking shrubbery, someone was panting. Against his better judgment, he let himself be lured from the path and circled the bushes, waiting for the moment when the branches would thin out enough for him to see clearly.

The ground sloped away. Here, under the trees, the earlier snow was untouched. It made a gray swale against which he spotted a few black shapes, rocks. There was the border wall, taller here, because the ground was a good fifteen feet below street level. And there, beneath it, was a black shape murmuring, kneeling, about ten yards from Charlie and facing away. Or two black shapes. A black man, hunched menacingly, and the body on its back in the snow.

Charlie couldn’t go forward, or even breathe: he was afraid a cloud of breath would float across the open space and call attention to him, and then he, too, would become a body stretched out on the snow. But he couldn’t just leave, either—not even with his wang starting to actually throb from having to pee so bad—because he realized, was realizing even now as his eyes adjusted, where Sam had been all this time.

Then a siren sounded somewhere, a far-off wail, and the black man glanced up from whatever he was doing. He staggered to his feet and stumbled off, trailing one hand along the wall, as if trying to exit a maze. With the sleeves of his white jacket bunched up, he was even more underdressed than Charlie, and the weird part, Charlie would realize later, was that he seemed to be headed toward the siren, rather than away. As soon as he was out of sight, Charlie was on his knees beside Sam. She looked so small all of a sudden—when the fuck had she gotten so small?—under the thick coat that had been spread over her. That she wasn’t shivering scared him. Her mouth was slack, her eyes closed. The coat was a dark spot. The snow around her head was dark, too, and sludgy, the snow he was kneeling in, and when he touched it and brought his fingers to his face, there was a burnt smell like the drill at the dentist’s. The solidity of her arm against his leg. The weight of her. “Oh, God,” he said. “What did he do to you?”

The hole that had opened in his chest threatened to swallow him. He may have started to pee a little. Above his head, sirens called and answered, a kaddish ramifying down empty streets. It is happening again. Still. He nudged her shoulder. “Sam, come on. Wake up.” He knew already it wasn’t a question of waking. “Sam. It’s me. I came to save you.” If she’d only stayed by his side. Why hadn’t she? And this, too, would pain him in retrospect, because he shouldn’t have been thinking about himself at this moment, or imagining it didn’t happen however it had happened. He would have to live with the fact that this was how he reacted to other people’s suffering—selfishly—and there would be times, he already knew, when he would wish it was him lying there unconscious, instead of awake, having to make choices.

Up where the wall ended, beams of blue and red whirled, cantilevered out over the park. He could hear doors slamming—as now, in his basement room in Flower Hill, he could hear the radiators wheezing, the artless feet of little brothers on the stairs. Even before they knocked on his door, he yelled, “Go away!” With his eyes closed, it felt like he was ripping a tumor out of his chest, and still the sickness remained. He tried once more to summon some foggy, bearded figure who would hear him. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, but Abe and Izz had retreated, and beyond the headphones all was silence. The bearded figure had likewise run away from him. Or had he, Charlie, been the one to run? Because, when push came to shove, he’d run from Sam, too. He saw himself again kneeling by his friend, literally red-handed. A voice, the voice that had earlier called for help, had been up above the wall, where flashlights poked holes in the night, scattering the birds: “It’s this way.” Charlie’s bladder had released at last, and warmth had trickled down his leg, and he was biting his lip not to cry out loud in shame and misery and terror, and at what seemed the last possible second, on pure instinct, he’d bolted back through the bushes and onto another path and sprinted off deeper into the dark, clutching his groin. He assumed they were on his heels.

By the time he realized that they weren’t going to catch him, that no one even knew he’d been there, he’d reached the park’s center: a huge, bleak field stretching away to a fringe of black trees. Except for his breathing, the silence was perfect. The purple-gray clouds were still, brittle. The muggers who should have been prowling around were nowhere. In the distance, buildings were lit-up prison towers, no life in them. It was like a nuclear wasteland, with Charlie the only thing alive. His jeans were soaked with urine. And tears and snot were frozen on his face, so he must have been crying. All he wanted was to lie down and close his eyes, but something in him felt that if he did, he wouldn’t open them again, and something else, something pusillanimous and unpunk, could not even now consent to that. He stripped off his damp jeans and Fruit of the Looms, wadded them up and pushed them into a bush. Naked from the waist down, he used a handful of snow to try to wash the pee off his leg. He’d heard people stranded in the Arctic buried themselves in snow for warmth, but he was too much of a wuss to keep this up for more than a second. He took the pajama bottoms from his jacket pocket and pulled them on and, leaving behind the rest, broke across the field, aiming for the tower at what seemed to be the corner of the park. His legs were going numb, numb, numb with the wind through the thin cotton, and numbness made things a little better, so he ran even harder, promising himself that soon he would be home in his bed and when he woke in the morning this would all turn out to have been some really crappy dream.

WHEN HE SLIPPED UPSTAIRS late Sunday afternoon, his mother was on the phone with the Asshole again; he could hear from the foyer the murmur of the voice at the other end of the wire. The time when the light available outside the house exceeded the light in the living room had passed, and still Mom wouldn’t reach the two feet to pull the lamp chain. She just sat there, like an old person. Then the doorframe was behind Charlie and his fingers were closing on the jacket she hadn’t reminded him to wear and lifting it from the hook. It seemed impossible that two nights ago, when this jacket had traveled with him to the City, he’d been so full of hope, he thought. And now the kitchen door clicked shut like his youth behind him.

The held breath of the world at five p.m. in winter. The sky above the haloes of the streetlights, electric air indifferent to anything happening below.

He let gravity pull him downhill toward the little church at the corner of the highway, Our Lady of Lamentable Perpetuity. Aside from the floodlights lighting up the nativity scene out front, the church gave no sign of being open. For a moment, he was sure he’d wasted his time. In the glass case by the church door, white plastic letters had been slotted into the black felt. MASS A.M., NOON, P.M., FROM HIM NO SECRETS HID. When he’d tried to explain his feeling sometimes that the whole world was trying to communicate with him, the grief counselor had laced his fingers together over the knee of his crossed leg and had said, “I’m wondering, Charlie, if that makes it easier to believe.”

“To believe what?”

“Well, whatever you feel is being communicated.”

He checked the bottom of the glass case in case a couple of letters had fallen there, some part of the message he was missing, but there was nothing. He reached for the handle of the church door. It was unlocked. He went in.

It wasn’t his first time in a church, or even this church. He’d come here back in middle school to see Mickey Sullivan make his first communion. Then last year at the Catholic hospital, when Mom had asked for a few minutes alone with Dad, he’d parked the outgrown stroller in the gift shop, Abe and Izzy inside, and snuck over to the chapel off the lobby to sit there with his hands in his lap. His brothers never squealed, and this made it worse, somehow, his tropism, his secret apostasy. The hospital must have toned it down a bit, though, because he’d forgotten about the glazed plaster Messiah hanging over this altar, its blue eyes gazing mournfully down among drops of ketchupy blood. Farther forward in the rows of pews sat three old women in black. Like the priest yammering up on the stage, they had their heads bowed, eyes presumably closed. Charlie stole forward and slipped into a seat in the shadows and pretended not to be peeking through his own shut eyes. They did that crossing thing to their chests, too quick for him to follow. Then the priest announced he would read from the book of Daniel. Was there even a book of Daniel? Oh, right. He remembered the general outlines from Hebrew school. Israel lay vanquished again. The Gentile king, uneasy, called to him a Jew gifted with prophesy. For the king could not know what the future held, but the Lord knew. The Lord always knew, as surely as if He were seated here right now.

This first reading, disappointingly, was in English, not Latin. Then came a Gospel. And all at once, as the priest read on, Charlie could finally feel Him, displacing the air at the back of his neck—not a benevolent giant, or a figure of plaster, but an athletic man only slightly older than Charlie himself, lightly acne’d beneath his beard, kneeling in the pew right behind, staring through Charlie’s shoulderblades and into his busted heart:

Oh, it had, it had! Sorrow had filled Charlie’s heart. It was as if Jesus was speaking to him specifically. Charlie couldn’t turn around, though, to verify that he was imagining things, because what if he should see that he was not imagining things, that a homeless man had slipped into the pew right behind him? Or that verily this was the Lord Jesus Christ, come to make him surrender?

Charlie clasped his hands and rocked forward and closed his eyes, but in the velvety dark behind his eyelids, like a curtained theater where the lights have gone out, he still saw the Savior Jesus Christ, with a swimmer’s shoulders and an expression like longing. The priest’s voice ran on far away. Much closer a voice whispered, Fear not, Charlie Weisbarger. He was terrified now, in the darkness of his own closed eyes, utterly alone and nearly in tears. I have set my mark on you. I will make you the instrument of my strong right hand. You have only to repent.

I repent, Charlie was helpless not to think, even as he wondered what he was signing up for—what this word, which he’d heard so often, actually meant. And then the vision was gone, leaving only an immense silence that filled the spaces of Charlie’s chest, pushing out what had been there before. When he looked, there was no homeless man.

Notwithstanding whatever had just gone down, he could not bring himself to do communion. The next time the widows bowed their heads to pray, he ducked into the side aisle and hurried to the back of the church. The priest was watching, puzzled, but Charlie kept his gait steady, as though redemption was a bowl of broth he might otherwise spill.