Moon Palace (29 page)

On the ninth night it rained, and Mrs. Hume and I managed to persuade Effing to stay in. It rained the following night as well, but there was nothing we could do to hold him back anymore. He didn’t care if he caught pneumonia, he said, there was work to be done and by God he was going to do it. What if I went without him? I asked. I would give him a full report when I returned, and that would almost be like having been there himself. No, that was impossible, he had to be there in the flesh. And besides, how could he be sure I wouldn’t put the money in my
pocket? I could walk around for a while and then make up some story for him when I got back. He wouldn’t have any way to know if I was telling the truth.

“If that’s what you think,” I said, suddenly beside myself with anger, “then you can take your money and shove it up your ass. I quit.”

For the first time in the six months I had known him, Effing actually broke down and apologized. It was a dramatic moment, and as he sat there pouring out his regret and contrition, I almost began to feel some sympathy for him. His body trembled, saliva clung to his lips, it seemed as if his whole being was about to disintegrate. He knew that I had meant what I said, and the threat of my walking out was too much for him. He begged my forgiveness, told me I was a good lad, that I was the best lad he had ever known, and he would never say another unkind word to me as long as he lived. “I’ll make it up to you,” he said, “I promise I’ll make it up to you.” Then, reaching desperately into the bag, he pulled out a fistful of fifty-dollar bills and held them up in the air. “Here,” he said, “these are for you, Fogg. I want you to have something extra. Christ knows you deserve it.”

“You don’t have to bribe me, Mr. Effing. I’m adequately paid already.”

“No, please, I want you to have it. Think of it as a bonus. A reward for outstanding service.”

“Put the money back in the bag, Mr. Effing. It’s all copy. I’d rather give it to people who really need it.”

“But you’ll stay?”

“Yes, I’ll stay. I accept your apology. Just don’t ever pull another trick like that again.”

For obvious reasons, we didn’t go out that night. The next night was clear, and at eight o’clock we went down to Times Square, where we finished our work in a record-breaking twenty-five or thirty minutes. Because it was still early, and because we were closer to home than usual, Effing insisted that we return on foot. In itself, this is a trivial point, and I wouldn’t bother to
mention it except for a curious thing that happened along the way. Just south of Columbus Circle, I saw a young black man of about my age walking parallel to us on the opposite side of the street. As far as I could tell, there was nothing unusual about him. His clothes were decent, he did nothing to suggest that he was either drunk or crazy. But there he was on a cloudless spring night, walking along with an open umbrella over his head. That was incongruous enough, but then I saw that the umbrella was also broken: the protective cloth had been stripped off the armature, and with the naked spokes spread out uselessly in the air, it looked as though he was carrying some huge and improbable steel flower. I couldn’t help laughing at the sight. When I described it to Effing, he let out a laugh as well. His laugh was louder than mine, and it caught the attention of the man across the street. With a big smile on his face, he gestured for us to join him under the umbrella. “What do you want to be standing out in the rain for?” he said merrily. “Come on over here so you don’t get wet.” There was something so whimsical and openhearted about his offer that it would have been rude to turn him down. We crossed over to the other side of the street, and for the next thirty blocks we walked up Broadway under the broken umbrella. It pleased me to see how naturally Effing fell in with the spirit of the joke. He played along without asking any questions, intuitively understanding that nonsense of this sort could continue only if we all pretended to believe in it. Our host’s name was Orlando, and he was a gifted comedian, tiptoeing nimbly around imaginary puddles, warding off raindrops by tilting the umbrella at different angles, and chattering on the whole way in a rapid-fire monologue of ridiculous associations and puns. This was imagination in its purest form: the act of bringing nonexistent things to life, of persuading others to accept a world that was not really there. Coming as it did on that particular night, it somehow seemed to match the impulse behind what Effing and I had just been doing down at Forty-second Street. A lunatic spirit had taken hold of the city. Fifty-dollar bills were walking around in strangers’ pockets, it was raining and yet not
raining, and the cloudburst pouring through our broken umbrella did not hit us with a single drop.

We said our good-byes to Orlando at the corner of Broadway and Eighty-fourth Street, the three of us shaking hands all around and swearing to remain friends for life. As a small coda to our promenade, Orlando stuck out his palm to test the weather conditions, thought for a moment, and then declared that the rain had stopped. Without further ado, he closed up the umbrella and presented it to me as a souvenir. “Here, man,” he said, “I think you’d better have it. You never know when it might start raining again, and I wouldn’t want you guys to get wet. That’s the thing about the weather: it changes all the time. If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.”

“It’s like money in the bank,” said Effing.

“You got it, Tom,” said Orlando. “Just stick it under your mattress and save it for a rainy day.”

He held up a black power fist to us in farewell and then sauntered off, disappearing into the crowd by the time he reached the end of the block.

It was an odd little episode, but such things happen in New York more often than you would think, especially if you are open to them. What made this encounter unusual for me was not so much its lightheartedness, but the mysterious way in which it seemed to exert an influence on subsequent events. It was almost as if our meeting with Orlando had been a premonition of things to come, an augury of Effing’s fate. A new set of images had been imposed on us, and we were henceforth cast under its spell. In particular, I am thinking about rainstorms and umbrellas, but more than that, I am also thinking about change—and how everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

The following night was to be the last one. Effing spent the day in an even more restless state than normal, refusing to take his nap, refusing to be read to, refusing every distraction I tried to invent for him. We spent some time in the park in the early afternoon, but the air was misty and threatening, and I prevailed
on him to return home sooner than we had been planning to. By evening, a dense fog had settled over the city. The world had turned gray, and the lights of the buildings shone through the moisture as though wrapped in bandages. These were less than promising conditions, but since no rain was actually falling, there seemed to be no point in trying to talk Effing out of our final expedition. I figured that I could dispose of our business in short order and then hustle the old man back to the house, working quickly enough to prevent any serious harm from being done. Mrs. Hume didn’t like it, but she gave in after I assured her that Effing would carry along an umbrella. Effing readily agreed to this stipulation, and when I pushed him out the front door at eight o’clock, I felt that things were fairly well under control.

What I did not know, however, was that Effing had replaced his umbrella with the one Orlando had given us the night before. By the time I discovered this, we had already traveled five or six blocks from the house. Snickering to himself with some obscure, infantile pleasure, Effing whisked the broken umbrella out from under his blanket and opened it. Since the handle was identical to the one on the umbrella he had left at home, I assumed this was a mistake, but when I told him what he had done, he boomed back at me to mind my own business.

“Don’t be a clod,” he said. “I took this one on purpose. It’s a magic umbrella, any fool can see that. Once you open it, you become invincible.”

I was about to say something in response, but then I thought better of it. The fact was that it wasn’t raining, and I didn’t want to embroil myself in a hypothetical argument with Effing. I just wanted to get the job done, and as long as it didn’t rain, there was no reason for him not to hold that ridiculous object over his head. I pushed on for another few blocks, handing out fifty-dollar bills to all the likely candidates, and when half the supply was gone, I crossed to the other side of the street and began heading back in the direction of the house. It was then that it started to rain—as if inevitably, as if Effing had willed the drops to fall. They
were quite puny at first, almost indistinguishable from the misty air all around us, but by the next block the drizzle had turned into something to be reckoned with. I steered Effing into a doorway, thinking we would stand there and wait out the worst of it, but the moment we stopped, the old man started to complain.

“What are you doing?” he said. “This is no time for a breather. We still have money to hand out. Let’s get cracking, boy. Mush, mush, let’s go. That’s an order!“

“In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “it happens to be raining. And I’m not just talking about a spring shower. It’s coming down hard. The raindrops are the size of pebbles, and they’re bouncing two feet off the pavement.”

“Rain?” he said. “What rain? I don’t feel any rain.” Then, with a sudden forward thrust on the wheels of his chair, Effing broke free of my grasp and glided onto the sidewalk. He took hold of the broken umbrella again, raised it with his two hands high above his head, and shouted into the storm. “There’s no rain!” he thundered, as the rain crashed down on him from all sides, drenching his clothes and pelting him in the face. “It might be raining on you, boy, but it’s not raining on me! I’m dry as a bone! I’ve got my trusty umbrella, and all’s well with the world. Ha, ha! Blow me down and batter me blue, I don’t feel a thing!“

I understood then that Effing wanted to die. He had planned this little farce in order to get himself sick, and he was going about it with a recklessness and joy that fairly stunned me. He waved the umbrella back and forth, urging on the downpour with his laughter, and in spite of the disgust I felt for him at that moment, I couldn’t help admiring his courage. He was like some midget Lear resurrected in Gloucester’s body. This was to be his last night, and he wanted to go out in a frenzy, to bring his own death down on himself as his final, glorious act. My initial impulse was to haul him back from the sidewalk and get him to a safe spot, but then I took another look at him and realized it was too late. He was already soaked to the skin, and with someone as frail as Effing, that probably meant the damage had been done. He would catch
cold, then he would come down with pneumonia, and a short time after that he would die. It all seemed so certain to me, I suddenly stopped struggling against it. I was looking at a corpse, I said to myself, and it didn’t matter if I took any action or not. Since then, not a day has gone by when I have not regretted the decision I made that night, but at the time it seemed to make sense, as though it would have been morally wrong to stand in Effing’s way. If he was already dead, what copy did I have to spoil his fun? The man was hell-bent on destroying himself, and because he had sucked me into the whirlwind of his madness, I didn’t lift a finger to stop him. I just stood by and let it happen, a willing accomplice to suicide.

I stepped out from the doorway and took hold of Effing’s chair, squinting as the rain gusted against my eyes. “I guess you’re copy,” I said. “The rain doesn’t seem to be touching me either.” As I spoke, a flash of lightning snaked across the sky, followed by a tremendous clap of thunder. The rain poured down on us without mercy, attacking our exposed bodies with a barrage of liquid bullets. After the next burst of wind, Effing’s glasses were knocked clean off his face, but all he did was laugh, reveling in the violence of the storm.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” he shouted at me through the noise. “It smells like rain. It sounds like rain. It even tastes like rain. And yet we’re perfectly dry. It’s mind over matter, Fogg. We’ve finally done it! We’ve cracked the secret of the universe!“

It was as though I had crossed some mysterious boundary deep within myself, crawling through a trapdoor that led to the innermost chambers of Effing’s heart. It wasn’t simply that I had given in to his grotesque ploy, I had made the ultimate gesture of validating his freedom, and in that sense I had proven myself to him at last. The old man was going to die, but for as long as he lived, he would love me.

We careened uptown for another seven or eight blocks, and Effing howled in ecstasy the whole way. “It’s a miracle!” he bellowed. “It’s a goddamned bloody miracle! Pennies from heaven—
get them while they last! Free money! Money for one and all!“

No one heard him, of course, since the streets were entirely empty. We were the only fools who had not scrambled for shelter by then, and in order to get rid of the remaining bills, I made a number of brief visits into bars and coffee shops along the way. I would park Effing by the door as I entered these establishments, listening to his wild laughter as I distributed the money. My ears buzzed with the sound of it: an insane musical accompaniment to our slapstick finale. The whole thing was raging out of control by then. We had turned ourselves into a natural disaster, a typhoon that swallowed up innocent victims in its path. “Money!” I would shout, laughing and weeping at the same time. “Fifty-dollar bills for everyone!” I was so waterlogged that my boots squirted puddles, I gushed like a human-sized tear, I dripped water on everyone. It was fortunate that we had come to the end. If things had gone on much longer, we probably would have been locked up for reckless endangerment.

The last place we visited was a Child’s coffee shop, a squalid, steamy hole in the wall illuminated by glaring fluorescent lights. There were twelve or fifteen customers hunched over the counter, and each one looked more forlorn and miserable than the next. I had only five or six bills left in my pocket, and suddenly I didn’t know how to handle the situation. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t decide anymore. For want of anything better to do, I wadded up the money in my fist and flung it across the room. “Whoever wants it can have it!” I yelled. And then I ran out of there, pushing Effing back into the storm.