Fearless (33 page)

Max didn’t want her to cry. He said, “Maybe he’s playing a trombone,” as though the subject were absurd.

Carla was surprised. She leaned back on the sofa and her deep brown, almost black eyes looked up at the ceiling. Her face smoothed while she looked. Finally, she said calmly, “You’re right. If he’s playing something it would make a lot of noise.”

“But it’s all pretty ridiculous,” Max said. He had no desire to be sympathetic. Anyway, it was obvious that pity only made her mad. “It’s just that everyone is scared by the idea that life and death happen without any reason. They think you’re born because your mother wanted you so much or because God wanted another great home-run hitter to play for the Yankees. And they think you die because you’ve been bad or careless—you smoked or you committed adultery or you forgot to put on your seat belt. That way, even though you can never be good enough or careful enough to live forever, at least you can try. But if it’s out of our control, if it makes no sense and just happens, then there’s no reason to do anything.”

“There’s no reason to love,” Carla said to the ceiling.

“People don’t so much believe in God as that they choose
not
to believe in nothing.” Max didn’t think this was much of a philosophy, but it was the best he could do.

Carla lowered the ancient and lovely form of her face to his level and looked straight at him. Her dark eyes were wide under her thick circular eyebrows. Max watched her pouting and tempting mouth. Being with her in the perfect little living room he felt serene. After a moment of consideration, Carla shook her head no. She said in the relaxed voice of honesty, “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I believe in him. He may be a fucking bastard—He was a fucking bastard to me—” Max’s worst fear came true; her eyes filled with tears and she was crying.

“No.” Max took her hand. He stood up, pulling her hand at the same time. It was cold to the touch. That shocked him. The apartment was hot and she looked hot—in her dark hair and dark eyes and white T-shirt—but her hand was cold and unloved.

His touch stopped her tears. “What are you doing?”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“No!” She pulled to free her hand; it was not only as cold as ice but just as slippery. It slid out. She hid it under her leg. “I don’t go outside! Didn’t they tell you?”

“Yes. But you’re safe with me. Nothing bad can happen to you with me. Didn’t you read about me in the papers? Everyone with me lived. With me you’re safe.”

Carla frowned; then she smiled her crooked smile. “You must think I’m very stupid,” she said in good humor.

“No!” Max was appalled. He slid off the love seat, dropped to his knees and pleaded. “I’m not lying. You
are
safe with me. I can’t explain why. But I’m not lying.”

“You’re serious,” she said, more as an observation than a question. “What are you telling me? There’s no God but there’s you?”

Max leaned toward her on his knees and extended his hands in a plea. “Come with me, Carla. I promise you’ll be safe.”

Carla beamed at him, as if he had done something delightful. From behind he heard her mother make a noise.

“What are you doing!” the old woman said. He felt her hand on his shoulder, pulling at his sweater. “Get up. Get off your knees.” She abruptly let go of Max and added softly, “Carla…?”

Carla was laughing. She had opened her mouth—it turned out to open very wide—and was letting go of volleys of laughter, aimed at Max by her bright eyes.

Max took them with a smile. His hands were still out, offered to her. He whispered, “Come with me?”

Her mother didn’t make another move to interfere. She stared in dumb admiration at her merry daughter.

“Sure, I’ll go,” Carla said to Max and gave him her hand.

His car was comfortable. It was foreign, a name she didn’t recognize or know how to pronounce. Max told her it was pronounced
sob
.

“I don’t like that name,” she said and was nervous. The troubles she’d had since the crash whenever she went out had begun. Her hands were moist and her stomach hurt. Each breath stuck in her throat; there seemed to be only a little space left to fill up with air. “Is this a good car?” she said. Her voice was weak and her ears were stopped up with the noise of her own frightened blood. She could hardly hear herself ask the question.

“It’s a very safe car,” he said as he pulled away from the curb. “Very safe and I’m an excellent driver. Never been in an accident—not while I was behind the wheel anyway. And you know what? It doesn’t mean we’re going to survive this ride. Because even if I do everything right, even with us strapped in, and with the marvelous technology of the Saab’s collapsing cage and its reinforced doors and roof, we could still be crushed to death or hurled to death. We’re not safe because of the car or because I drive defensively.”

“What?” she asked. She forgot about trying to absorb air from the small sac of it in her throat. She looked at Max. He smiled at her, at ease and friendly. How old was he? His graying kinky hairs didn’t tell her much, because it was the kind of white hair that can come early. His face was lined at the eyes and mouth, but only a little and he had the kind of fair skin that wrinkled easily. He could be as young as thirty or as old as fifty. “What did you say?” she asked, not really believing she had understood.

“We’re not safe. No matter how good this car is, no matter how carefully I drive. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. You know we’re not safe—that’s why you’re scared.”

Carla laughed. “Everybody else keeps telling me things are safe. You’re just saying the opposite to fool me.”

“No. I’m not playing a mind game. It’s the truth. It’s not safe. In fact, you’re not safe sitting in your apartment. On Mulberry Street you’re hardly more than a mile away from one of the biggest faults in the United States. Someday, maybe in a few minutes, there’ll be seven plus, maybe even an eight earthquake. This city isn’t built for it. You’d be dead. My guess is more than a million people would die right away. And even if you survived you might eventually die. Since this is an island, with all the gas lines and the density—people could be trapped on Manhattan with an inferno around them and no way to escape or to fight it.”

Carla shifted a bit and took a good look at this man, a stranger really, with whom she was now stuck. He looked Jewish to her: very pale skin, a relatively short man with nervous hair who seemed never to have done any physical labor. His hands were smoother than hers; she’d bet they were softer too. But he had good features, a broad smart forehead, beautiful pale blue eyes, a reasonable nose and a wonderful mouth that seemed to curve twice at the ends, subtly down and subtly up so that he could look sad or happy with only a small change in their undulations. “You told me I was safe with you,” she said, feeling betrayed.

“You are. But not because the car is safe or New York is safe. We’re safe because we died already.”

That scared her. Sunlight glared on the cold streets. A beam flashed off a car’s fender, blinding her. She was terrified. Maybe she was actually dead; maybe this was purgatory, believing you were alive, but having no feelings except sad ones and hating the people you love. “I’m not dead!” she yelled.

“No, you’re not,” he said. He steered the car crosstown, heading west. He was calm. “I didn’t say that. I said you’ve died already. You’ve passed through death. You’re alive now. Both of us are. All of the survivors are. Don’t you see? Everybody else”—he gestured at the streets, at the people hurrying to their destinations, hunched against the cold, scurrying with the fear of hunted mice—“they don’t know what it is to die in their minds like we did.”

“That’s bullshit.” She turned even more in his direction. The seat belt pulled taut against her shoulder. His face looked smooth and very young from this angle. She couldn’t see any sign of a beard on those white cheeks. He could be twelve years old. “I didn’t die in my mind. My baby died and I got hurt but I didn’t die, I didn’t think about dying, I just thought about my—” She stopped.

“You just thought about what? How your baby died?”

He had steered onto the West Side Highway extension heading uptown. “Where are you going?” Carla demanded. She wasn’t scared or nervous. But she thought he was crazy and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be alone with him in a car.

“The Sawmill.”

“The what? You mean out of the city?”

“Yes. The Sawmill is such a great winding road and so pretty. It was built to please the rich.” Irrationally he gestured at the river and the rotting dock structures. “Well, the middle class anyway. To be a pleasant road for a Sunday drive. The man who designed it—” Max chuckled, “his name was Moses—he imagined a world full of happy, prosperous self-satisfied people with good-natured servants and shiny cars that never broke down. And it didn’t bother him that his own brother died homeless. What an asshole. No, he wasn’t an asshole,” he seemed to be arguing with someone else, someone who wasn’t in the car. “He wanted to build his dreams and not just be a good man. A stupid, gullible good man whom everybody cheats and ignores.”

“You talking about yourself?” Carla asked. She had definitely decided he was crazy, but she no longer feared him.

“Yes.” He smiled at her. “You’re smart,” he said and he meant it. He looked sane enough: his pale eyes were friendly; his bush of gray and black hair was benign. “Is it all right if we take a drive and see some trees even if their leaves are dead?”

This was her chance to stop it. He was reasonable and he would let her go back. But she felt comfortable. She had forgotten her small throat and sweaty palms. The car was warm and quiet, her seat ample and soothing. Seeing the miserable, cold, and frightened world through the hard clear glass of the windows felt good. It gave her a kind of strength. He was crazy but he was right—she was safe with him.

Two days later Max returned without phoning ahead and stood in the tiny foyer, his hands folded, to ask if she wanted to see scenic Jersey City. He shuffled his feet like an awkward adolescent asking her out on a date. She said yes, sure that he was kidding about the Jersey City part, but he wasn’t, he wanted to see the Newport Center Mall and that’s what they did, driving all around it while he made comments on the architecture and the surrounding old buildings, many of them deserted, even burned out. Later, when she returned home her mother made a big joke out of his idea of sight-seeing and probably Manny would have too, if Carla were talking to him, which she wasn’t. That was why she tolerated her mother’s reappearance from California with the intention of staying through New Year’s. With her mother there it was easier to ignore Manny.

Carla enjoyed Max’s tour. After they went around and through the Newport Mall by car, he pulled into its huge multileveled parking lot and asked if she wanted to eat some lunch. She was hungry. The same sort of gnawing hunger that came on suddenly in the middle of the night, a hunger for comforting foods, a hunger she couldn’t satisfy no matter how much she ate and a hunger that so far she had felt only when alone.

She wanted to say yes but she was frightened at the idea of leaving the car. The mall was crowded with Christmas shoppers.

“Remember,” Max said. “We’re ghosts. They can’t do anything to us.”

“You’re crazy,” she said to him, scared by his idea. She felt comfortable telling him. “You’re really crazy, you know that?”

He smiled with his lips shut; the double curves at his mouth’s corners undulated. The sun came across his face through the windshield; his white skin seemed to glow whiter, as if he were made of packed snow.

“I should talk,” she said. “Okay.” She took a breath and opened the car door. He came around to her side. He put his arm through hers. He was wearing a navy-blue wool jacket, a thin jacket that hugged his upper torso and left the rest of him exposed. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked, shivering inside her goose down.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I should buy a coat in the mall.” They walked across a covered bridge from the parking lot and entered the mall.

It was beautiful, Carla thought. They had come in on the third floor and she could see down through the open central area to the two lower floors. Everywhere there were Christmas decorations and scenes. Sculptures of reindeer were paused beside plastic pine trees and brilliant poinsettias, all arranged on soft white cloth that looked like snow. There were lights strung along the glass panels at the ceilings and also along the railings of each level so that white, red and green lights blinked everywhere—pretty stars in a small universe.

And the people! Carla had forgotten what crowds of people look like. Haggard mothers shouted after their running children. Harassed fathers stood before store windows filled with goods, their heads bowed, defeated by choices. Giggling teenage girls flounced past, packed together, shoulder-to-shoulder, hair bouncing and trailing them like wedding trains. Solemn boastful teenage boys paraded after the girls; like sullen peacocks, their legs stretched ahead of their torsos with suspicious grace, eyes watching the girls with contempt and mastery.

Max guided Carla among them. She noticed a fat mother with pink beefy arms carrying a newborn. Every other second the mother kissed her baby’s bald head softly—a reflex while she studied the mall stores. She wasn’t even really in the throes of loving her baby; the constant kissing was routine. Carla didn’t hate her, didn’t pity her, didn’t envy her. She wondered about her life, if she had always been fat, what her husband was like, and if the baby was her first child. She stopped beside them and stared at the newborn’s head while the mother paused to look at the shoe store’s display window. Carla brought her face within inches of the baby and the mother; neither seemed to notice her. Maybe she
was
a ghost.

Max tugged at her to continue. She felt they were gliding soundlessly to the rhythm of the piped Christmas music, passing unseen by the mob of shoppers: gangs of men, women and children bustling with packages, eyes red and exhausted yet shining with appetite. They weren’t gangs, Carla reminded herself. They were families, spinning out and then back to each other, like planets in orbit, loose and yet never free.