Nowhere (2 page)

Having fed, I sluiced my palate with the last of the rosé, gathered the containers and crumbs into a plastic bag from a supply I had filched from a roll at some supermarket produce counter, opened my rear window, and airmailed the garbage into the cavity between my building and that which faced on Madison Square, into which areaway I confess I had never actually looked since I moved in. I must say that this mode of rubbish disposal had been suggested—nay, demanded—by the super of this decaying edifice, who came around but once a fortnight except in case of emergency (at which time he could not be found at all) and the day before Xmas (when
I
hid from
him,
for once, and was not even flushed from concealment by the lighted cigar he furiously, recklessly, hurled through my transom).

I put away my tablecloth and from a neighboring drawer of the desk took out the script of my play. Perhaps this would be the night on which I should lick the problem of the third act, always a ticklish one for the dramatist, especially if like me he had filled the preceding two-thirds with insoluble problems, such as that of the priest who does not discover his horror of women until he leaves the Church to marry a Jewess with whose sociopolitical ideology he is in sympathy: a sort of radical bourgeoisism in which all citizens are compelled by law to marry and produce one child of each sex and to travel a sufficient distance by Winnebago camper each summer, else be placed at hard labor in regional work camps. Obviously I had an axe to grind, but I did not want to be so flagrant as to offend future theater parties.

I thought of making the girl black—or perhaps the priest. Or the priest might rather be made a rabbi, a black rabbi. No, an Episcopalian priest, a female Episcopalian, who is furthermore gay, and her mate is a black woman... no, I was getting too sentimental now. I must start all over again, my hero an honest, hearty farmer of Swedish extraction; he comes to the big city; he meets a kindly female impressionist; he—

At this point my telephone rang, somewhere beneath the tangle of bedclothes on the studio couch. If the truth be known, I was relieved, though (presumably to impress myself, in the absence of any other human beings) I slammed down my Bic Banana, cursed, and assumed an expression of creativity annoyingly interrupted. But not being sufficiently prosperous to impose this upon the world, I answered genially.

A bass and I should say utterly humorless voice told me: “Joo batter get out from zis house, my fran’, or be destroyed.”

I confess I was distracted by the accent, which seemed to have elements of many languages not closely related to one another. I decided it was a hoax: such things are commonplace in my profession. Many wags enjoy pulling the leg of a private investigator. Call it thrill-seeking, but there are people who apparently get pleasure from calling a total stranger and, in a ridiculously incredible falsetto, making him an indecent proposal. Usually I drop the handpiece in silence, but on this evening I was piqued.

“Drop dead, you jerk,” I growled, borrowing the taxi-driver’s idiom, which is useful when one is feeling as verbally uninspired as I was at that moment.

“Is nawt time for little games, fallow, I assure you. Bums are there!”

I sniffed. “If you are serious, my friend, then I must assure you that the bums in this neighborhood wouldn’t,
couldn’t
, destroy anybody. They are far too feeble.” Still, I didn’t much like the news that some of them had again bedded down inside the front door: that entryway stank enough as it was.

“Dun’t talk like a prrrick,” said the voice, with lip-trilled, not uvular,
r
. “I can tell you zis: bums will go off in tan minutes. You must live or die.” Or perhaps it was “leave or die.” Either way, it was at this point that I first began to grasp what he was trying to tell me. Though funnily enough I was still slow to reach worry.

“Ah,” I said patiently, “you mean ‘bombs,’ don’t you? Things that blow up? Uh-huh. Say, would you be offended if I asked—” I was interested in identifying his native tongue, but since this sort of inquiry might offend, I decided to add some soft soap: “Not that I’m suggesting you don’t speak English well.”

“You crazy fokker!” he shouted. “Get your ahss from out that house or lose it! Now don’t talk no more, just ron.” He added what seemed a total irrelevancy: “Sebastiani Liberation Front.” And hung up abruptly.

Trends come and go in all eras, but I should say that only in ours do they get successively more vile: in recent years it had become fashionable to detonate explosives in public places in the name of some usually unrecognizable cause. Frankly, I think the urge to destroy comes first, and then he who has it looks for a slogan to mouth while blowing up people and things, with the idea that his mayhem thereby becomes perfectly reasonable.

At the moment I did not require a precise identification of the caller’s group: I had wasted too much time already. I dropped the phone and, I think, was out the door before I heard it hit the desk. I took the stairs in two bounds and was in the street on the third.

A short, redhaired daughter of joy, a regular on the beat, was just sauntering past the building. “Hi, Rus!” said she. (I sometimes exchanged a bit of chaff with these ladies.) “You don’t look like you got it on straight, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

It is with some pride that I can report my unthinking response as gallant: I swept this (fortunately little) tart up off her feet and, carrying her in the crook of my arm, like an outsized loaf of bread, I gained most of the block to the south before the explosion came, destroying not only my building but also the restaurant next door and the liquor shop across the street, along with its companions, the Asiatic spice shop and the shallow doorway of the
hôtel de passe
of which my current burden, the petite harlot, was a relentless customer if she could find a series of live ones. And of course all windows were shattered for a quarter of a mile by the punch of sound.

Being at a right angle to the blast, and a street away, we suffered only the bruises sustained in the plunge to the street I took owing to the aural shock. Which Bobbie, for such was her name, had the effrontery to chide me for!

“Chrissakes, Rus,” she sibilated indignantly, hopping to her feet and brushing at the scuffed buttock of her designer jeans, which incidentally she wore a good deal more modestly than did most current females who were freebies.

“So don’t thank me for saving your life!” I said. I was still sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, looking towards Twenty-third Street. I had not yet made the foregoing list of casualty-buildings. Indeed, for a moment or two I was enjoying the odd serenity that claims me on the very threshold of total collapse. I could reflect gratefully that while the Whatever Liberation Front were thoroughgoing swine to plant that bomb, I could not hate them for warning me, in fact demanding that I leave the premises. I could only assume that if the restaurant were still occupied, a similar call had been placed next door, and to whoever was available in the other buildings.

Still breathing deeply from my exertion, though otherwise, so far as I was aware, in standard condition (which is to say, at thirty-five somewhat flabby though underweight; hair, teeth, and eyes OK)—I am holding back the narrative here, because I have always been fascinated by the tendency of reality to be amateurishly timed.

Meanwhile, various persons came running towards the locus of the explosion, from up or down Lex and out of the numbered side streets. Bobbie was sufficiently eager for business, owing no doubt to her exigent pimp, to solicit several of the males in the collecting crowd, and in fact she finally netted a chap with a gray mustache and tinted eyeglasses, who led her to a double-parked Chrysler Imperial whose engine was idling and whose plates had been issued by the state of New Jersey.

Eventually, though in reality it was probably all of twenty seconds, I got to my feet, remembering to hope that I had not fallen into the dog dirt that was once again extant, now that the population had become blasé about the poop-scoop ordinance, and finding none on a finger-search of my clothing, I approached my late office-
cum
-home, much of which was no doubt represented now in the pile of rubbish that filled the street. But more, in fact most, as I could see when the angle permitted, had plunged to the lower portion of the building, and had been followed by the roof and the furnishings thereof: vanes and vents and great slices of the surface of Tar Beach. The jagged walls of the first three stories contained all that had stood above and made a kind of giant topless box of rubbish.

Somewhere in the thick of things was the play on which I had heroically labored for so long, without, however, having had the sense to make an extra copy of it for preservation in a safe place.

On the other hand, one might profitably see this experience as the opportunity for a new beginning, and in truth nobody had ever seemed to cotton to that now buried work even as an idea—even when sitting drunk on the next bar stool (having got there on my money) in my local, a Third Avenue establishment frequented by people who fancy themselves as belonging to the intelligentsia because they can often name the principal players in prewar movies, follow pro football, and drink less hard liquor than any previous generation.

The police cars began to arrive; and the fire department, in many companies and with much apparatus, clanged in from all points. Before I could collect my wits (which of course had been badly jostled), such a crowd of professionals and amateurs of disaster had collected that I found it difficult to report to anyone in authority.

“Would you let me through?” I asked a beefy, beery man who had apparently come from the Hibernian bar a block or so north: he still clutched his glass of foam.

“Naw,” he genially replied. “I was here first, pal.”

“But I
lived
in there,” I protested.

“Call that living?” He remained rooted.

I abandoned this fruitless colloquy when a cop came through the nearby crowd.

“Officer!” I cried. “That was my home, where the bomb went off!”

But he, too, was indifferent and pushed me aside with the heavy and, I always suspect, mocking courtesy of the New York police officer. “
Exkewse
me. Hey. Awright. Lemme. OK, folks. Huh? Naw. Yeah?” So far as I could hear, though they seemed to cover every eventuality, none of these noises was made in actual response to anything said by anybody else.

I tried another cop or two, with no better success, but then, seeing some television newspeople arrive and emerge from their vans with hand-held cameras and lights, I decided to make application in that quarter, and maneuvered myself through the crowd until I confronted Jackie Johansen, a local channel’s sob sister, easily recognizable but in person displaying a graininess of cheek and lifelessness of bleached hair not evident on the home screen.

“Jackie!” said I. “I’m the man concerned. It was my home that was bombed. You’ve got an exclusive interview!”

She stared briefly at me with her pale eyes, and then turned to one of the males in her entourage, a short, very hairy, clipboard-holding man in worn denims and Nike shoes, and asked: “Who the fuck is this?”

“A nothing, a schmuck,” said he, thrusting into the crowd, breaking a route for Jackie and a lithe fellow toting a camera. They vanished.

“Ah, humanity!” sighed someone to my right. I turned and saw a derelict whose discolored skin and blue teeth looked vaguely familiar: he had been amongst the lot on the steps of the post office when I came home only—what?—an hour or two ago. Now I had no home. Foul as he was, I had an impulse to hurl myself on his malodorous chest and cry my eyes out—but this was gone in an instant. I grimaced and headed away from the crowd.

But this embarrassing acquaintance was relentless! He stayed on my heels, moving remarkably nimbly for a wino, crying outmoded historical banalities, which for some reason annoyed me more at this moment than obscenities would have: “ ‘Man is a political animal.’...‘Power tends to corrupt.’...‘A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’ ”

I’m afraid that all I could think of at this juncture was the feeble “ ‘Let ’em eat cake.’ ” I hustled on towards Third Avenue, having no destination in mind, but was soon stopped by a jeer.

“That’s ‘
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
,’ ” shouted the bum. “Not
gâteau,
nor was it said by Marie Antoinette!”

I was stung by this gibe. I turned slowly, ransacking my brain for something, anything, that could be launched as a Parthian shot.

But before I managed to make a sound, my tormentor came close to me and said, in a quiet but authoritative voice, as contrasted to his derelict’s bombast: “Follow me. I’m one of Them.”

I don’t know why, but I trusted him, probably on the mere strength of his scholarly pretensions, to be at least more than a common bum. He pushed, as if drunkenly, past me, maintaining the imposture, and lurched to the corner of Third. I came along behind. The avenue was deserted, all of local humanity being over at the site of the blast on Lex. My man staggered to the curb and stepped down into the gutter between a parked VW Beetle and a large, battered gray van, where, hands at his crotch, he was seemingly preparing to urinate but was actually checking discreetly on the clearness of the coast; having determined which to be acceptable, he scratched at the door of the van. One of its panels soon opened, and he stepped up and in, and I followed suit.

During the few instants before the door was closed it was dark in there, and I could not so much as see who had let us in, and only now did I reflect on the ambiguity in the term “Them.” “They” might well have been the people who had blown up my home.

But then the lights came on, and I could see why they had been turned off: the interior of the vehicle was virtually an electronics laboratory, the walls of which were covered with dials and switches and meters, and cables crisscrossed the floor. A dour man in a spotless coverall and wearing a headset shared this constricted space with the “derelict” and me.

I asked a necessary question: “Who
are
you fellows?”