In Memory of Angel Clare (24 page)

This star seemed to float, almost drift in the sky. Michael saw another star, and still another, both fainter than the first, stars that did not hold perfectly still in relation to each other, but seemed to slip—a constellation slowly collapsing together, like the end of the world.

Then the morning star abruptly changed direction and sailed across the sky. They were planes, not stars. The air above Queens was swimming with them, white landing lights hovering and darting. Michael was disappointed.

He turned his back on the sky and walked west, toward buildings and streetlights. He knew what he had to do. The heaviness inside him drew him inward, deeper and deeper, as if he were collapsing into himself. But not here. Not yet. He needed pen and paper first.

He walked quickly. He was afraid he might procrastinate to the point of doing nothing at all, but the decision remained with him. He tried to decide how. The image that came to him was of mind and life blowing out of his skull like a final sneeze. He poked a finger into his temple and repeatedly snapped his thumb as he walked. But Michael didn’t know where he could get a gun. Other methods repelled him. To jump and fall was too much how he had lived his life. An overdose of something meant he’d sleep through his own death. Hanging seemed more a torture than a death; his head already ached and the idea of blood trapped and pounding in his head sickened him. He wanted to lose his blood, get it out of his body and throw it in the faces of those who didn’t believe in him.

The street was drained of color; it looked like a bad print of a silent movie, gray and unearthly. Only when Michael glanced back and saw the paling sky behind him could he believe the light was natural. A taxicab rattled out of nowhere, banged around a corner and was gone, leaving a deeper silence behind. Michael never came to The World. Either he was on the wrong street or it had vanished while he was gone. He came to a broad avenue that seemed eerily deserted compared to the traffic and crowds he knew. A few trucks rolled past and two or three people were visible up and down the long sidewalk, but people disappeared in such enormous space. Trees stood on the median like motionless billows of smoke. In the darkness inside a gated window stood the white shadows of wedding dresses.

It was another city, another country. The only times Michael had been out at this hour were when he’d been dancing with Clarence, when Clarence had shown him the life he led before he gave himself to Michael and film. They stumbled out of The Saint, exhausted and satisfied, and Michael was always amazed to find it light outside. Once, watching for a cab, they drifted along the curb in a daze and a car with its radio blaring stopped at a traffic light. Forgetting where he was, Clarence automatically began to dance again. The car pulled away; Clarence realized what had happened and burst out laughing. And he resumed dancing, without music. And Michael danced with him, guessing at the beat from the way Clarence moved, neither of them making a sound to cue the other. They danced in silence on a street corner beneath a hundred darkened windows, in the middle of a city still asleep on a Sunday morning. Michael had been beautifully happy. He was ashamed of himself now for having been so happy.

He thought this colorless light was all there was, until he saw a fan of yellow light stretched over the sidewalk up ahead. It was as if he had forgotten color. The yellow light came from a little all-night market, the kind run by Koreans. They would have what he needed. He stepped under the awning and stopped.

Beneath the awning, bins of yellows, reds, and greens glowed like a box of paints. The colors were so intense they hurt. There was something frightening yet beautiful about so much color, something crazy. Michael had to pick up an apple to assure himself it was only fruit. He gently set it down again and gave it a pet. Buckets of flowers crowded beside the door and Michael bent down to sniff them, never sure which had a scent and which didn’t. He liked the idea of flowers and enjoyed giving them, but he never understood what other people saw in flowers, not even now. Already his deep feeling over the color of things was subsiding. He drew a deep breath and went inside.

A stout Korean woman stood at the counter doing some kind of paperwork. She might be the last person he ever spoke to. There was gray in her neatly tied black hair; she wore a quilted jacket over a man’s flannel shirt. Her fingers were stubby and her round face was abstractly cheerful, like a smiley face. A tape player on the shelf sing-sang something Asian—Clarence had claimed that if cats were musical they would sing songs like this one.

The woman finally looked up from her work. “Yes?” she said, with an abstractly cheerful smile.

“Yes. Do you sell ink pens?” He was startled by how young and loud he sounded; it was as though he hadn’t spoken in days.

The woman proudly gestured at a cup full of pens beside the cash register.

Michael hesitated, unable to choose, then realized how insane it was to care what color ink he used. He plucked out a red pen. “And paper?”

She took down a box of envelopes, then a handful of little spiral notepads, and shrugged to show this was all they had.

Michael pointed at a spiral notepad. “And razor blades.”

She looked straight at him and, for a second, Michael thought she knew.

“For a safety razor. To shave,” he explained and mimed shaving, finding a light stubble on his chin.

“Oh shaver! Yes.” The woman slapped her cheek and bashfully laughed. She reached toward a cardboard display of disposable razors.

“No, no. Just blades,” said Michael. He almost mimed doing something to his wrists.

“Yes?” She held out a tiny carton of ejector blades.

Michael had been picturing the old-fashioned razor blades he remembered his father using, double-edged, paper-thin, the dangerously flimsy blades Michael had handled very carefully as a boy to trim the plastic and decals of model cars and helicopter gunships. He hadn’t imagined anything as familiar as the ejector blades he now used himself. Of course they would do.

He watched the woman add everything together on the register. He pulled crumpled bills from one pocket, carefully smoothed them out, and paid her. When she gave him his change and passed him the bag, he said, “Thank you. Thank you ever so much,” and suddenly thrust his hand at her.

She smiled, gladly took his hand, and gave it a firm shake, as if it were perfectly normal for a customer to want to shake hands. Her palm and fingers were warm and smoothly leathery.

Outside the bright store, the street had acquired a little color. The trees on the median had gone from gray to gray-green; the sky was lighter and there was a dusty pink glow along the edge of a cloud overhead. Michael felt different now that he carried a bag with everything he needed. The pressure to do what he was doing no longer had the same desperate urgency. There was no longer the horrible emotional weight behind it; Michael felt no emotion at all. He even thought he didn’t
have
to do this, for a second. Then he rebelled against the thought. He would stick to his decision. If his emotions were no longer involved in it, it would enable him to be more rational, clear, and patient than he had been before.

He sat on a long concrete step in front of a closed, caged shop to write his note. The step was perforated with tiny windows of thick glass, disks like eyeglass lenses, which glowed from the light in the basement below. It was like sitting on eyes. While he composed his thoughts, Michael began to go through his pockets, pulling out money, smoothing out bills and stacking them together, then adding them to the money still in his wallet. He found he had over fifty dollars left. It was strange to have so much money and be sitting here on the street like a common derelict. A suicide note should be composed in peace, even in comfort. Michael realized he was hungry. He should eat and write his note in a suitable place, a special place. This was the most important thing he had ever done, and he did not need to rush into it. He stood up and resumed walking, wondering where he should have his last meal.

More traffic, people, and light stole into the city as he made his way uptown. This was the last time he would ever see New York, and he thought things should be as furiously present as the fruit outside the Korean market. Instead, the city seemed to dissolve in the bright sunlight that kindled the tops of buildings and slowly made its way down toward the street. All colors became thin and transparent, like the burned-out colors of an overexposed photograph. Even time seemed to thin itself out, so that Michael had no sense of how long it took before he stood outside the Algonquin Hotel, half-reflection and half-shadow on a plate glass window, smoothing his hair with both hands.

In his four years in New York he had never been to the Algonquin, but he knew where it was, knew what it stood for. Ben used to tease Jack for treating their circle as “a homo Algonquin Club.” By coming here for his last meal, Michael felt he was proving something, striking at something, although he was uncertain what. The other fancy places he knew had no meaning for him at all.

The lobby was comfortably dark and rich, all oak paneling and pools of dim light. A few well-dressed men sat reading newspapers and drinking coffee among chin-high partitions of wood and etched milk glass. With his paper bag folded neatly under his arm, Michael walked up to the front desk and curtly told the clerk, “I’m meeting a relative and I’m early. Is your dining room open?”

“Yes, sir. Straight ahead, sir.”

Michael gave the man a cold nod and strode back to the restaurant. He requested a table for two, adding that “an uncle” would be joining him later but that he would be eating alone. He was seated at a table around the corner with his back to a rose-colored wall. A fatherly waiter took his order. The table setting opposite him was left in place, silverware on the starched white tablecloth outlining the presence of someone who wasn’t there.

Sitting very still, Michael slowly looked up. The few diners scattered around the room chewed and swallowed in silence. It was so quiet Michael imagined he heard a click of teeth and squish of tongues. Waiters in black moved about on soundless feet, the only clear sound in the room the muffled tinkling of porcelain. Coffee in a bone-white cup and saucer appeared on the table. Michael lifted the cup, sipped, and carefully reseated the thing in the indentation in the saucer. The coffee tasted like school and the morning after an all-nighter before an exam. He took the notepad and pen from the bag and set them on the table. Beneath the table, he took out the little packet of blades and turned it around in his fingers, looking for directions printed on the box. He returned the packet to its bag and eased the bag into his coat pocket. He opened the notepad and tested the pen on the first sheet of paper, writing, “Goodbye cruel world.”

He read it and almost burst out laughing. He was amazed by his wit. Because it seemed genuinely witty to him, a brilliant, cynical joke. To kill yourself and leave nothing behind but a cliché?

But people would misunderstand. They would think it was only smartass, think even his death was smartass. It defeated the whole purpose, didn’t it? Michael turned the page, took another mouthful of coffee, and tried to muster his reasons. The pen hovered over the blank page for a long time, then he gave up wanting to put it all in words. He wrote simply, “I cannot live without Clarence Laird. I want you to understand. You never understood before.”

He sat back and read that. It seemed a poor, bare thing. He imagined Jack scoffing at it, sneering at it for its artlessness the way he had sneered at Michael’s poetry. That fat library queen, that critic. Michael decided to leave his note bare and flat, just to show he didn’t care what Jack thought. The opinion of that nonentity should mean nothing to him.

He leaned down again and wrote, “All money left in my bank account is to go to my father to pay him back for everything.” Would the bastard get the anger in that phrase? Michael added, “Let him know whose money it was and how it came to be mine.” That felt perfect, like he was paying his father with Clarence’s blood.

“Sir?”

He clamped his hands over the notepad.

The fatherly, long-faced waiter stood over him with a plate of bacon and eggs.

Michael snapped the notepad shut and held it in his lap while the waiter slid the plate in front of him. He sat with his head lowered until the waiter was gone. He set the notepad and pen to the right of the plate, picked up the fork, and slowly remembered how to use it. The eggs were porcelain white and lightly puddled with butter. When he applied the fork to one, the yolk burst and the plate was flooded with yellow.

Eating distracted him. He found a nicely physical hollowness in his stomach, and the food was soothingly real, full of tastes and different textures that came apart in his mouth. He loaded the sticks of toast with strawberry jam, needing the sweetness. He kept adding salt to things, wanting to increase the salty wetness flowing in his mouth. Looking around the room, he was pleased to be eating here after what seemed a lifetime of eating in the kitchen in Phillipsburg. He opened the notepad again and read and reread his words while he ate. He hadn’t noticed when he was writing that the ink was red; the note seemed written in blood. He reread it until the words became opaque and beautiful, like poetry. He didn’t bother to cover it when the waiter came by to refill his coffee cup. He wished he could read it aloud to the man.

When there was nothing left to eat, he methodically wiped off his fingers with the napkin, then picked up the pen and signed the note. He added their last address and gently tore the sheet of paper from the wire spirals. He began to pluck the paper crumbs from the ragged edge, but decided he liked the effect and its suggestion of something severed. He folded the paper in half, then in quarters, and slipped it into his shirt pocket, where the police would find it when they found his body.

Where would they find his body? Writing the note made him feel the deed was already done, but he still had to decide where. He thought about doing it here. Not in the restaurant but in a hotel room. He could rent a room and do it here, and people would know he had come to the Algonquin before he died. They would realize he had done this not in a desperate fit of insanity, but reasonably, even civilly, with a nice breakfast before he went.