The Hand That Feeds You (6 page)

He took the beating for me. Two months later, our father threw him out of the house, and Steven hitchhiked to New York City. He hired on with a construction crew in Hoboken and took night classes in criminology at John Jay. By the time I got to New York, Steven had left for Afghanistan to work as a lawyer for the State Department. He traveled to outlying villages, encouraging chieftains to follow one of the pillars of Islam—to support the poor and establish a public defense system. He found the work immensely meaningful, but the living conditions wore him down. He and his coworkers lived in a hotel-turned-bunker, which was blown up by the Taliban a few months after Steven left. When he got back to New York, he went to work with Avaaz, an NGO whose name meant “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern, and Asian languages. He felt aligned with their humanitarian mission and programs, from human trafficking to animal rights.

•  •  •

I landed at Dorval just before rush hour, got a cab, and gave the driver Bennett’s address in the Quartier Latin, on rue Saint-Urbain, Montreal’s equivalent to Bedford Avenue, the hipster epicenter, a half mile from where I lived. Although the houses in the Quartier Latin were the same as row houses found in Williamsburg, the French had painted them pale blue and adorned them with the wrought-iron balconies you find in New Orleans; in Williamsburg, the houses were ornamented with shrines to the Virgin and high-kitsch tributes to Italy.

We started down a commercial street. It was early fall and already freezing, but people were still sitting at outdoor cafés.

Another couple of blocks and the driver slowed down to read the street numbers. There was no forty-two. “Are you sure you have the right address?”

“Is this Saint-Urbain Street? Is there a north or south?”

“It should be right here.”

I paid the driver and got out. I wondered if I had reversed the number and walked back two blocks, but twenty-four was a Laundromat. Bennett had told me about this little restaurant below his apartment where the owner made him the best omelet he’d ever tasted, Deux something. I walked up and down the block but saw no restaurant at all. I typed Bennett’s address into my phone’s GPS and waited for directions, but the window showed there was no such address. “Oh, come on,” I said aloud. I went into a shop and asked if there was a restaurant nearby called Deux something.

“This is Montreal. Everything is Deux something,” said the clerk.

I retraced my steps as though the numbers would magically change and my mounting sense of unease would vanish. Had I ever written him at this address? No, we’d only e-mailed and Skyped. I tried to remember anything else he told me about his neighborhood or his friends, but all I could remember were the musicians he represented. He was a music agent for Canadian indie bands. Maybe one of them was playing in town. I bought a newspaper from a kiosk and a bag of Smarties. I found an outdoor café around the corner and took a seat despite the cold. I took a few deep breaths and opened the paper to the Arts section. There were no band names I recognized.

I noticed the café was filling up and people were ordering dinner. My plane home wasn’t leaving until midnight. The streetlights went on. The waiter came over again and this time I ordered something—poutine and a small Diet Coke.

“Is Diet Pepsi okay?”

He brought over a
petite
bottle. Unlike in America, the small was actually small, and I felt cheated.

I felt I should know what to do next. I’d spent the last two years memorizing procedures and methodologies, examining crime scenes, interpreting incident reports, investigating missing persons, all manner of victims. Yet I could think of no model to follow here. I had a funny thought: Could I file a missing person’s report on a dead man? Why had Bennett given me a false address? What had he been hiding? A wife? A family? Was he in trouble with the police? So this is why he always came to me. So the B&Bs with their prying hosts and too-sweet breakfasts were about secrecy, not romance. What else had he lied to me about?

Whom was I mourning?

S
teven’s apartment, where I was camped on his sofa bed, was walking distance from the Manhattan coroner’s office on First Avenue. This was where all bodies were brought. I found myself in full-blown anticipatory anxiety. The coroner’s office had called again last night; they needed me to come in. I tried to convince myself that it would not be as bad as I imagined. I thought back to the first time I had seen a cadaver in an anatomy class. I had to will myself to look, after conquering the fear that I would be sick or faint. In fact, scientific interest had carried the day. I had been fine. But I was not about to have to view an ordinary body. Bennett—or whoever he was—was no longer identifiable. They couldn’t expect me to look at his body, could they?

I had expected Steven to get angry when I told him about Montreal, and he was, but he was also angry at himself for not having voiced his suspicions when Bennett kept finding excuses not to meet him. As if I would have listened if he had.

I had not been back to my apartment since leaving Bellevue, so my choice of what to wear was limited: yesterday’s jeans and ankle boots, the ribbed turtleneck I had worn to Montreal.

Steven had a meeting with the Afghani consulate: Avaaz was fighting for Afghani translators to be offered asylum. He had asked me to wait until the afternoon when he could go with me, but I had assured him that I could manage this by myself. He said it was not as if I were going for a driver’s license. I insisted, needing to know the form my changing view of Bennett would take when I saw his damaged body. The body I knew had been someone else’s body, after all.

A mobile boiler-room trailer fronted the monolithic, gray building. I would have expected a refrigerated trailer. I walked over the flat wooden bridge covering the electrical cables and entered a lobby.

I gave the woman at the front desk my name and told her I was expected on the fourth floor. She asked me to take a seat while she confirmed my appointment. I noticed an odd assortment of magazines on a couple of tables—
Sports Illustrated
,
Parents
,
Garden & Gun
, and the weirdly existential
Self
. A few minutes later, a young man in a lab coat came out of the elevator and asked if I was Morgan Prager. He invited me to follow him to another waiting area; this one smelled of formaldehyde and had no magazines.

“Do I have to see the body?” I asked, knowing in that moment I would not be able to look.

“We normally do IDs by photo, but I’m not going to ask you to do that. I do have some questions for you. I understand you were engaged to the deceased. Did your fiancé have any tattoos, birthmarks, scars, or deformities?”

“I guess the scar on his eyebrow is moot.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to ask.”

“No, I’m sorry, I just can’t believe I’m here. Bennett had no tattoos. But I don’t even know if his name was Bennett. What’s going to happen to the body if no one can identify it?”

“The body will be kept here for six months and then buried in the city’s cemetery on Hart Island. It’s off the Bronx.”

I could not identify the body but could I claim it? Did I want to?

The detective said that the body had been brought in without any personal identification, and none had been found in my apartment.

“What about his cell phone?” I asked. “He always had it with him.”

“We hoped you would know where it was. And his wallet.”

“Are you saying someone took them?”

“I’m saying the police didn’t find them.”

I felt that he was criticizing me for not knowing the whereabouts of Bennett’s phone and wallet, that this detective was exasperated with my inability to aid in the investigation.

I was surprised to find myself in tears. “Look, I don’t know who he was. I thought I did, but I didn’t. When you find out, please tell me, okay?”

•  •  •

I took the L train back to Williamsburg, to the Metropolitan pool off the Bedford stop, a 1920s public bathing house. A skylight ran the length of the pool. You could see sunlight on the tiles as you swam in the eighty-degree water. If I squinted, I could pretend I was floating in the Caribbean.

Swimming had been my routine—five days a week, summer and winter—and my passion. Actually,
swimming
wasn’t the correct term. I deep-water ran. I used an AquaJogger, a simple flotation device that fits around your waist so that you are suspended in the water. Some people jog, but I ran as fast as I could. The water slowed me, stilled me; the sensation was like trying to catch a train in a dream.

The locker room, with its broken fans and hair-clogged drains, smelling of ammonia and hairspray, didn’t prepare you for the beauty of the pool, a seventy-five-foot, three-lane lap pool, shimmering with light.

I used the slow lane, designated for the sidestrokers, kickboarders, and gossips who paddled and chatted. The lane was about the width of a subway car and peopled with the same assortment of strangers.

I normally entered by the ladder, but today I plunged in—I needed the silence and compression of water, the few seconds where nothing above the surface mattered. When I came up for air, I began running with an urgency that surprised me. I ran past the blind lady doing jumping jacks in the shallow end, past the old ladies who wore shower caps instead of swim caps and kept their makeup on, past the obese boy who treaded in place. If I were on dry land, I would have been running a six-minute mile.

I ran from the body of my former lover in the coroner’s office, from my own gullibility, from shame. The more I strained against the water, the better I expected to feel, but what I was up against was so large my body didn’t know if it was relaxed or just tired.

When I finally got out of the pool, I felt gravity again. Deep-water running is how astronauts learn to maneuver while weightless.

I got out of the pool just as Ladies’ Only Swim was starting, a two-hour period in which only women, mostly Hasidic, could use the pool. Curtains were drawn over the glass windows that looked out to the lobby, and the lifeguard was female. In the locker room, a dozen women of all ages were getting into their swimsuits, long dresses made out of bathing-suit material. I swam in a Speedo, yet I never felt contempt from them. In truth, they treated me as if I didn’t exist. Except for Ethel, who was as curious about me as I was about her. She said she lived a staid life with her husband’s Satmar family in Williamsburg, except during the summers, when she proudly sat in as a lifeguard at a kosher girls’ camp in the Catskills. She told me about Aqua Modesta, the original kosher swimwear dealer, an online shop that sold “modest” bathing suits. In the summer, though, she wore Aqua Modesta’s latest bathing-suit fashion: “capris.” “As long as your elbows and knees are covered,” she had explained.

I toweled off in the shower area and then walked into the crowded dressing room. For a moment, it looked as if scalps were hanging on hooks in the lockers. The ladies’ wigs!

•  •  •

“Did you have to look at the body?” Steven asked.

“Mercifully, no.”

“They tell you who he was?”

“No fingers, no fingerprints.”

The flippancy did not reflect my state of mind. It was more an attempt to level off a mounting hysteria.

I waited for Steven to call it a night and then signed on to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a database open to both the public and the police. Everyone in my Psychological Autopsy course had to register with NamUs. I clicked on the case number that the man at the coroner’s office had given me: ME 13-02544.

Minimum age:
20

Maximum age:
40

Race:
white

Ethnicity:

Sex:
male

Weight:
148

Height:
68, measured

Body parts inventory (check all that appl
y
)
:

All parts recovered

Head or partial head not recovered

Torso not recovered