Lowboy (24 page)

“Not here,” Violet said behind him. “Some other place.” It sounded as though the words were meant for someone else.

“He’s on this train,” Lateef said under his breath. “You saw—” But the door-closing theme cut him off. Assuming that he’s spotted us, he thought. If he’s spotted us how much time do we have left. Maybe a minute. He kept the doors of the car from shutting with the heel of his right foot and reached for the standpole to keep from falling over. “Come on, Violet,” he said. “Let’s not give him the time to change his mind.” But when he looked back at the platform she was gone.

Over the next three stations Lateef searched the train from back to front and checked the platform every time it stopped. The cars seemed more crowded than was usual for that hour of the morning but he’d long since lost all confidence in his judgment. At Grand Central he put in a call to Lieutenant Bjornstrand, then switched to the downtown express, still not thinking about Violet at all. The boy was distracting him nicely. He got off somewhere, Lateef said to himself. He must have. Bleecker Street or Astor Place. When the express started to move he sat down heavily on the bench and dug the knuckles of his thumbs into his temples. It hadn’t occurred to him to question the other riders—there’d been no time to question them— but as soon as he’d left the local he’d regretted it. He still regretted it. The back of his head was throbbing where his skull had hit the asphalt and his heart was spasming sickly in his chest. He thought about Emily’s deposition and her torn and filthy jacket and suddenly he was thinking about Violet. I’ll have nothing to tell her, he thought. Not a trace of the boy. She’ll think she was seeing things again. He brought his hands forward to cover his face and rolled them evenly from side to side. Maybe she is seeing things, he said to himself. Maybe both of us are. He tried to recollect what he’d seen with his own eyes but he seemed to have misplaced the memory. I saw what she told me, he thought, taking his hands from his face. I saw what she told me to see. The possibility occurred to him that he
might have been tricked, deliberately misled, made use of in some way he couldn’t name. But when he tried to guess at her reason for abandoning him his thoughts went dim or shut down altogether.

He got out at Union Square and went back to the bench and sat where she’d been sitting. The wood felt warm against his back, as if she’d only just left, but he didn’t believe it. He sat there silently and stiffly. At one point he’d felt able: he remembered that much. He’d felt confident in his abilities, even proud. It might in fact have been that very day.

I remember now, he thought suddenly. I remember when the feeling left me. I was sitting at my desk looking at the boy’s note, the one written in cipher, and I guessed that the keyword was “Violet” and it was. I decoded it and wrote it out in big block letters and appreciated it. Then I stood up and went to the door and saw her waiting for me in the hall.

Lateef sat for a time with his hands in his pockets, tapping his shoetips together, watching the trains come and go. They were nearly full now but the platform was empty and he couldn’t understand why that should be. Passengers got on and off but none of them seemed to linger. No one sat on the bench. After what might have been half an hour he got heavily to his feet and walked toward the stairs leading up to the exit and that was when he noticed Violet.

She stood bent to one side in the shadow of the stairs and seeing her there answered his last questions. Her face was tipped sideways and her pale mouth hung open and she moved her eyes as though a train were passing. She flinched as he approached her and from that he judged that she could see him coming. Otherwise he might have thought that she’d gone blind.

“Miss Heller,” he said, holding his hand out as if to an infant. But in reality she was prematurely aged, aged almost past recognition. He’d meant to say “Violet” but the name no longer represented her. “Miss Heller,” he repeated. She gave no sign of hearing him. He
opened his mouth a third time but he couldn’t seem to make the slightest sound.

“It’s gone bright,” she said. “Please turn it off.” Her mouth snapped shut after each word like the hinged jaw of a puppet.

“Don’t worry, Miss Heller.” He took a step toward her. “It’s Detective Lateef. It’s Ali.” He’d seen people in that state before or in something very like it and he knew there was no sense in moving quickly. The current running through her body was so enormous that she barely seemed to have the strength to breathe. He’d seen it times without number, in suicides and barricades and addicts of all kinds, but he had no way of knowing which she was. That wasn’t true of course: he knew perfectly well. The fact of it hovered in the air between them, buzzing almost inaudibly, waiting to be given its due. It had been waiting since sometime that afternoon. Lateef looked at Violet and cleared his throat to hear the noise it made. He heard the noise clearly and he was grateful to hear it. He bent over to make himself seem smaller.

“What was in those pills, Miss Heller?”

She ducked as though he’d thrown something at her. “A thing’s going to happen,” she said, running her tongue over her lips.

“Is that right?” he said. He took another step.

“Very soon. It’s happening already.”

“Can you hear me, Miss Heller? Do you know who this is?”

He waited a long time for her to answer. When at last she closed her mouth and covered her face with her hands he allowed himself to look over his shoulder. A few steps behind him was a payphone with a yellow receiver. He backed toward it cautiously, forcing his eyes not to stray, and reached it without once losing sight of her. He thanked God that no one else was on the platform. When he put the receiver to his ear the dial tone came through dimly but clearly and he sucked in a breath and thanked God for that also. He dialed Lieutenant Bjornstrand’s number and was told that his support was waiting for him up at Thirty-fourth Street. He asked for no explanation and none was offered. He set the receiver back in its cradle, closed
his eyes for a moment, then called Ulysses S. Kopeck, MD. Even as he dialed he knew what Kopeck would tell him but he needed to hear the words spoken. He might not pick up the phone, Lateef thought. If he doesn’t what then. But Kopeck answered on the second ring.

“Sorry to call you at this hour, Dr. Kopeck. This is Detective—”

“I recognize your voice, Ali. I’ve been wondering when you might call.”

Lateef kept silent for a moment. “You knew what was wrong with her,” he said. “You knew exactly what the problem was.”

A pause for effect as in a theater. The pause before the punchline. “Of course I did, Detective. Didn’t you?”

“Are you trying to tell me, Doctor—” He stopped to take another breath. “Do you mean to tell me that we talked for half an hour in your office, with her waiting right outside, and you never once saw fit to let me know?”

“I have a confidentiality agreement with my patients, Ali. I like to honor that agreement.” Kopeck cleared his throat mildly. “In any event, I assumed that her condition was self-evident.”

“Not to me it wasn’t. Not to me.”

“I’m surprised by that, Detective. I’d been told you dealt with cases of this nature regularly. After all, you’ve been with Miss Heller for the better part of—”

“Just tell me what’s wrong with her, you fucker. Give me her diagnosis.”

“Since you put it that way, Detective, Miss Heller is a paranoid schizophrenic.” He could hear Kopeck’s lips smack together as each word was expelled. “Can I help you with anything further?”

The 4 came in behind him and a napkin pirouetted at his feet. He wasn’t looking at Violet anymore. He wasn’t looking at the train. “I’ve been with her since this morning, like you said. I’ve seen my share of schizophrenics. I never would have guessed—”

“Miss Heller has what psychiatrists call a high degree of insight into her disorder, unlike her son. When I was seeing her, she took
two hundred milligrams of Clozapine daily, in tablet form, and forty milligrams of Celexa.”

“She never told me that. None of it. I asked her—”

“You asked her directly?”

Lateef didn’t answer. The 4 had pulled up and its doors had opened. He studied the motionless car packed with commuters. They seemed to be under the impression that they were moving. None of them so much as glanced at Violet.

“She didn’t want me to know,” Lateef said. “She was right not to tell me. I’d never have taken her with me if I’d known.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that, Ali.”

Lateef looked down at the receiver for a time, weighing it in his palm, then dropped it lightly back into its cradle. The 4 had rolled away without his noticing. He turned his head unwillingly toward the stairs, half expecting to find her gone, wishing to find her gone with all his might. She was in much the same position as before, perhaps drawn farther back into the dark, perhaps bent slightly nearer to the floor. Muttering and working her jaws as though she had something between her teeth. As he came forward he wondered whether she had been listening. No matter now. She was standing with her chin wedged against her left shoulder, cursing everything she saw, but she quieted when he said her name and drew her gently toward him.

A
t 116th Street the train came to a regretful stop and a man slipped sideways through the doors and sat down across from Lowboy. No one else was in sight. Thirty-seven seats to choose from not counting those reserved for cripples but the man sat down without a moment’s doubt. A storklike man with crimped orange hair and the righteous eyes and bearing of a prophet. He stared up and down the aisle as though to quiet his many accusers and when he was finished he turned and smiled out of the side of his mouth at Lowboy. The waitingroom smile of an insurance claims adjuster or a dentist. Can a dentist be a prophet, Lowboy wondered. Can an insurance claims adjuster. He was about to ask when the man held up a finger.

“No laces,” the man said, pointing at Lowboy’s shoes.

Lowboy stuck out his feet. “Velcro,” he said softly. That was the term. He waited for the man to go on talking.

In place of an answer the man raised his finger again. His Adam’s
apple quivered on his flushed and wattled neck. A moment later he lowered his finger like a dowser’s wand until it was pointing down at his own shoes. They were wrapped in silver duct tape from the laces to the shins. The tape looked new and heavy and expensive. It made Lowboy suspicious.

“Where are your socks,” Lowboy whispered.

“Where are yours,” said the man.

Lowboy looked down and saw the man was right. Who could have taken them, he said to himself. Secretary most likely. That reminded him of something.

“I saved the world,” he said.

The man shrugged his shoulders. They rode on in silence as the train made its rounds and the man sucked his teeth and repeated every one of Lowboy’s movements. When he pitched the man pitched. When he jerked the man jerked. There was something behind it. At each stop he made a wish that someone else would get on but when the doors opened he always changed his mind. Ninetysixth Street now. Eighty-sixth Street presently. The man jerking left and right and mimicking him like a monkey at the zoo. Sucking on his teeth and bobbing his head and tapping his heels together to make music. A territorial display or could it be a courtship. The skin on Lowboy’s face began to itch.

“What’s under the duct tape,” he said. “What’s behind it.”

The man grinned and snorted and got to his feet. “Nike cross trainers,” he said. He reclined from the crosspole. “There’s a Dumpster at the Foot Locker on Broadway and Eighteenth—”

“Get away from me,” said Lowboy.

To his surprise the man sat down at once. “You’re one of us,” he said. “You’re a colleague.”

Lowboy looked past the man and said nothing.

The man stretched his legs out and arched both his feet like a dancer. “I take them off sometimes,” he said. “On certain occasions. For example when I cross the Musaquontas.”

“The Musaquontas,” said Lowboy. His throat tightened. “The Quiet River.”

“That’s the one.”

“You must be the Dutchman.”

The Dutchman took a comb from his pocket and ran it elegantly through his hair.

“I’m Will,” Lowboy offered. “William Heller. Heather Covington said—”

“All right, Will. Good enough. Let’s say that you were going to buy a house.” He pointed the comb at Lowboy. “Would you sleep in it first?”

“A house?” Lowboy said. It made him think of his sketches of Emily.

The Dutchman nodded. “Would you sleep in it or buy it right away?”

Lowboy shook his head dumbly. Was it really the Dutchman. He looked outside for an answer but there was nothing to see but the sweating walls and weepholes of the tunnel. No ciphers or bar codes or graffiti. The message was gone could he still recollect it.

“Would I sleep in the house,” said Lowboy. He considered the question. Emily’s face had turned into a house. “Yes,” he said. “I’d sleep in it.”

“Good boy.” The Dutchman’s head slid toward him. “Spend the whole goddamn night there. Check it for ectoplasmic activity.”

“My mother was a house. So was Emily. I was a piece of paper or a cigarette or a bed.”

The Dutchman clucked thoughtfully. “How’s Rafa been?”

“Heather Covington,” said Lowboy. “She called me ‘little baby.’ She took me down the tunnel to the bottom of the world and the quilt and the little blue suitcase. I couldn’t do it, Dutchman. There was a little white girl in her passport. Her name was Heather Covington. Dr. Zizmor was the one who made her black.”

“Covington,” said the Dutchman. “Good enough.”

“That’s what she called herself,” said Lowboy. “I called her that. I told her about me and Skull and Bones—”

The Dutchman sat up straight. “What do you know about Skull and Bones?”

“I told Heather Covington,” Lowboy said, stammering. “I told Rafa—”

“Shut your mouth,” said the Dutchman. “I was a member of that dread society.”

“Bones is a milkfaced man,” said Lowboy. “Not much to look at. Skull is the size of a—”

“They manage the planet,” the Dutchman said, nodding. “They make it
productive
. They’re the ones making things hot.”

A curtain opened as the Dutchman was talking and Lowboy understood the world completely. He remembered a platform, the back of a train, the cool air growing warmer on a curve. Without Skull & Bones he might never have gotten his calling. He’d recognized them as his enemies and had run up the platform’s yellow lip and the doors of the train had opened when he kicked them. He couldn’t help but take that as a sign. From the moment he’d entered the train he’d been hallowed and exalted and beloved. He’d disappeared into the tunnel like a plug into a socket and the tunnel had given him everything.

“Things aren’t getting hotter,” said Lowboy. “Not anymore.” He pressed his hands against his stomach. “See that, Dutchman? Nothing there. I’ve had my sex.”

The Dutchman blinked at him. “You’ve had your sex,” he said.

Lowboy bobbed his head. “My calling said to let my insides out. An offering it told me or a sacrifice. It happened just this morning. The world was inside me and I was inside of—”

“Jesus
Christ
,” said the Dutchman. He let his head fall back against the window. “Who cares what you’ve been inside of, little boy?”

A keening came up off the rails or a voice raised in outrage. He made a fist and the train passed Eighty-sixth Street. He made two and it passed Seventy-seventh. “Tell the truth,” he said. “That’s not right.” His voice was no louder than the keening but he could feel it pushing up out of his throat. “Tell the truth Dutchman. I was in a burned car and a woman walked past me. She told me I was out of gas and I was. She called me her doggy. She took me to a fivecornered room.”

“Not enough,” said the Dutchman. His lips barely fluttered. “Not enough.” It rang out in the dead air like a bell.

“It was enough,” Lowboy said carefully. “It was.” They were passing Sixty-eighth Street. “I had my sex with her. Later when I woke up it was cold.”

“It’s six o’clock now,” said the Dutchman. He said it without opening his mouth. “You didn’t stop anything, William.”

“I didn’t want things to stop,” Lowboy shouted. “Just the temperature games. I wanted to keep things from getting hotter. I wanted to keep the end of the world away.”

“It goes on and on,” said the Dutchman. He tipped over and his face went sad and soft. “It’s too painful.”

“It’s painful,” Lowboy said, nodding. He stopped to catch his breath. “It hurts very much. But it’s possible—”

“It’s
impossible
,” said the Dutchman. “One day your body understands that. Then you die.”

Lowboy watched as the Dutchman got smaller and smaller. He was lying on his side now humming quietly to himself. Is he dying, Lowboy wondered. Is he falling asleep. The train pulled into Fortysecond Street and the C# and A sounded and no one got on.

“You’re wrong,” Lowboy said to him. “I disagree.”

The train bucked forward suddenly and the tunnel fell back and the express track came and kissed the track beneath them. The keening filled the car like a fog or a color but also like the first note of an opera. Lowboy went to the doors and looked out at the tracks and saw the glittering waterway between them. A river whose name he’d long since forgotten. An express train went by with a person at each window and none of them seemed to be dying. I disagree, Lowboy thought. It’s not impossible. For the first time since the world hadn’t ended he tried to imagine Violet and the trains waiting to take him to her house. Not impossible, he said under his breath. At Bleecker Street I can switch to the uptown F. He bent down to tell the Dutchman but the Dutchman was the size of a receipt. The train shot through Twenty-third Street without stopping. People rolled their eyes and shivered and made faces. People shrieked and laughed and stepped out of their clothes.

At Union Square the Dutchman left the train. He dropped to the floor and glanced over his shoulder and skittered up the aisle like a mouse. He’s not dead, Lowboy thought. He’s not dead and it’s not impossible. He sat on the bench with his face to the window and watched the Dutchman disappear into the crowd. The keening had stopped and he felt almost hopeful. The crowd on the platform surprised him a little but he reminded himself that it was six a.m. Violet would be getting up soon unless he’d made some sort of error or she’d died. Maybe she hadn’t ever gone to bed. He pictured her in the kitchenette, hair sticking up like a schoolboy’s, frying onions and garlic in butter. Her face was the color of soap but that was perfectly all right. It was always that color first thing in the morning. “Transfer at Fulton Street,” he said out loud. “Switch to the uptown platform, then five stops close together on the C.” That’s all it was.

Would she be getting up now, would she be taking her meds, would she be sliding her legs out from under her rustcolored sheets. Would she be muttering to herself, would she slip sideways out of bed, would she throw open the curtains and pick out one of his father’s records, would she put it on carefully and smile for a minute and make Turkish coffee in the blue enamel pot. Would she make scrambled eggs and bacon and rye toast. Would she hum out of key to the music, would she change clothes in the hallway or the kitchenette or the bathroom, would she make a face at herself in the mirror as she went by. Would she tap at his door lightly with two fingers, would she come in a moment later, would she choose clothes for him to wear and lay them out across his bed, boxers socks T-shirt buttondown corduroys sweater, would she squint at them for a while then change her mind. Would she lay a palm against his forehead to wake him. Would she give him a moment then tug gently on his ear. Would she laugh at him then. Would she call him Professor. Would she seem sorry to have woken him at all.

When he opened his eyes the train still hadn’t left. There were people in the car now and some of them were close enough to touch. That was no problem either. He was about to let his eyes shut to make time go faster when he saw Heather Covington shuffling down the uptown platform like someone searching for a missing pet.

The doors slid closed a moment later but by then he was halfway up the stairs. He had news for Heather Covington she’d be very glad to hear it. Union Square Station, he said under his breath. It had always been his favorite on the line. There were too many people on the stairs and when he looked back at the platform Heather Covington was gone. Once he would have been careful not to touch anyone but now it couldn’t be helped there were so many of them scratching and stumbling and rushing to get to the train. He remembered at
Columbus Circle how the crowd had spun him slowly clockwise. So much simpler and more beautiful than deciding. I’ll go back there, he thought. I’ll take Violet tomorrow. Then the last man pushed past him and he came to the top of the stairs.

When he reached the uptown platform Heather Covington was there. The curving track conjoined them like a carousel. The rails clacked and whistled: a flat childish music as if from a calliope. She was at the far end of the platform making for the uptown tunnel. Her feet were bare her shirt was bunched and tattered. Miss Covington, he shouted. He ran up the platform’s corrugated lip. Rafa, he called to her. Listen to me Rafa. I’ve had my sex.

The tunnel puckered like a mouth as she came near it and Lowboy started to worry. People were in his way but he ignored them. I did a good job Rafa, he shouted. The tags told me so. Slow down Miss Covington. The world can stop ending. But then he ran right into Skull & Bones.

He ran into them from behind and he was past them before he saw what he had done. They blinked sleepily at him as he went by, stupid and unsurprised, and caught up with him in three unhurried steps. Have they been expecting me, he wondered. Have they been waiting all this time. They were dressed in tight black uniforms like Nazis and their silent movie softshoe had been neatly put aside. Their names suited them now. They wore their names like hats. They circled him like two cats around a bird, heavy and lazy and indifferent, never coming close enough to touch him. He couldn’t explain it. He felt the old fear climbing saplike through his body from the soles of his feet where it had long been stockpiled and he opened his mouth and gave a little cough. He stopped and retched and
Skull & Bones kept circling. His fear made the world happen slowly. The crowd behind him rustled like a sheet. As he looked up the platform he heard his name said in a whisper. Is that you William Heller. Is that William. Is that Will.

It’s me, he said. Yes. Is that you Emily. He spun around in a circle and picked her face out of the crowd. It was easy to find her. She wasn’t the new Emily or the old Emily either but the one that he’d drawn pictures of at school. A circle with two lines on top of it. A house with a hairy roof. Come here to me, he said. We’re not done talking. She took three steps and stopped at the edge of the crowd. He smiled at her and tried to see her better. I’m sorry Emily, he said. Next time I’ll do my best to draw you better.