The Sea Beach Line (10 page)

I lay down on my father's narrow mattress. With the sleeping bag and army blankets he had laid out on top of it, the mattress was
comfortable enough to sleep on. I was a lot skinnier than him, though, and if he tossed and turned at night—as he always had, during his violent nightmares—he must have butted up against the collapsing stacks of books. When I laid my head back on the pillow, something hard knocked against my skull. I moved the pillow aside to reveal a gun of sorts. It had started life as a bolt action .22, not unlike the rifles we'd fired prone at the summer camp I attended in the Catskills when I was in junior high. The barrel of this one had been dramatically shortened and the stock sawed off altogether, so the gun could be held and fired more or less like a pistol. The magazine extended straight down, longer than the tape-wrapped grip.

I climbed back over the boxes and pulled the door shut. The storage-unit doors were made to only lock from the outside, but Alojzy had rigged up a chain and a deadbolt to hold the door closed from the inside. I fastened them both.

The gun did not surprise me. I had handled a gun of my father's once before, about a year after he'd given up the apartment in Sheepshead Bay. He was gone for ten months after that, during which time I received four postcards from him, three from Nevada and one from California. Back then, I just accepted postcards as signs that Alojzy was thinking of me; I hadn't known to try to parse whatever he was telling me through the drawings.

When he came back, he moved into a residential hotel up in Ridgewood. Most of the other rooms seemed to be occupied by twitchy Serbian men—war criminals, I imagined, on forged passports. Between the Serbs and the fact that we were in Queens, I got the impression that my father was hiding out. It didn't help matters when he showed me the revolver he kept under his mattress.

“Is it real?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Is it loaded?”

“What good would it be, a pistol with no bullets?” He let me hold it, making sure that I kept my finger off the trigger and away from the hammer. It was heavy, and I kept thinking it would go off or even explode in my hand.

My most instructive interaction with guns came on a trip to Israel I'd taken with my synagogue youth group the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I kept a precise mental log of everything I saw on that trip, so I could talk to my father about it when I saw him again. We spent a day and a half on an IDF base, a desert outpost in the south, where we got to shoot Galils with the soldiers. The unfired shells were as long as my middle finger. So much power erupted from the barrel, and yet I barely felt any kickback against my shoulder.

My father had served in the IDF in the pre-Galil era. He once told me that the first rifle he was issued wasn't an M16, but a twenty-year-old Czech Mauser. These guns had been built for the Germans, but remained undelivered at the end of World War II, and the fledging Israeli army had bought them from the Czechoslovakian government wholesale. The outline of a swastika was still visible in the stain of his gun's butt, he told me, underneath the riveted-on IDF insignia.

They tried to sell us on joining the IDF as overseas enlistees after high school, and I considered it, but not seriously enough. Instead I enrolled in Oberlin on Bernie's dime and observed the world from a smug distance. I attended a couple meetings of the campus chapter of Jews Against the Occupation, read Edward Said's
Orientalism
in class, and dated a Lebanese girl, Mariam. She was from a Christian family. I think her dad had been in one of the militias. She liked to talk about her Arab American identity and denounce the murderous Zionist state, because it made her feel less guilty about the fact that her father had probably murdered Palestinians himself.

We broke up after three months, not because of religion or politics, but because I would always get anxious halfway through sex and lose my hard-on. I came maybe six times during those three months I was with her, and only two of those times when I was actually inside her. I was already smoking a lot of weed and messing around heavily with drugs, especially pills, but I don't think that had much to do with it. I think I just wasn't that good at sex. After I broke up with Mariam, I started doing a lot more hallucinogens. I didn't have any other girlfriends after her.

I pulled open the bolt of Al's sawed-off. An unfired round ejected, and another one popped up at an angle, ready to be slammed forward into the chamber. I'd never been alone with a loaded gun before, and wasn't entirely comfortable with the feeling, so I started to eject the rounds one by one. There had to be a simpler way to do this, by removing the entire magazine from the bottom, but I didn't know how to do that. And as much as I didn't want to leave a loaded gun around, the feeling of loading each round into the chamber before I ejected it was satisfying. For a moment, I let my finger rest on the trigger. If I wanted to, I could shoot a round off into the concrete floor. Taking my finger off the trigger, I ejected the round. Then I loaded and ejected until there were eleven shells on the floor and none in the gun.

I collected the shells, and lined them up in the grooves of the plastic crate, next to the lantern. Leaving the bolt open, I placed the gun down on a pile of books. It looked wrong—too casual—so I picked it back up and leaned it against the metal wall, next to a gallon jug half full of water, which I then drank from. Water ran down my cheeks, and I flinched from the cold. My father had drunk this same water. It probably tasted less stale then. He wouldn't have minded the coldness, though. Three or four pint bottles of Mr. Boston blackberry brandy were piled on the floor. Nothing was cleaned out. It was like he'd just stepped out, and would be coming back any minute. One of the brandy bottles had a little left in it, so I finished it off.

So many books were packed into the small space; it was hard to see them as anything but one oozing mass. As I became acquainted with the unit, I figured out the vague order to the piles. Paperbacks. Hardcovers. Fiction. Nonfiction. One pile of books caught my eye as being altogether different from the others. They were sketchbooks, not published books, and they had color newspaper photos of what appeared to be bombing scenes, maybe in Iraq or Pakistan, scotch-taped to the fake leather covers. A mosque burned in full color. A market lay in ruins.

The same type of images, only hand drawn, filled the inside of the book. Smoke. Flames. Smaller flames bursting from the barrels of guns. The crying faces of children with Middle Eastern features.
Their bodies writhed and burned. Details of Israeli insignia appeared through the smoke. Guns were rendered in full detail, while bodies faded away into abstraction.

Alojzy had drawn with multiple thicknesses of black pen. Faces were sketched with long, mournful strokes from felt-tipped pens, while guns and insignia were drawn in minute detail with thinner ballpoints. Smoke and flames were made with thick streaks of Sharpie, which poured over everything else. There was not always white space, or even clear delineation, between one scene and the next. Bodies tumbled into one another. The living shared space with the dead.

I flipped through the pages quickly, afraid if I dwelled too long on any one page I'd be sucked into its horror. A third of the way through the sketchbook, the horror ebbed, and the foreign faces gave way to faces I recognized. My mother and my sister. Me. There were neighbors I remembered from our old building on East Ninety-Second Street. The olive trees were replaced with the foliage of Central Park. My mother was so beautiful. I hoped Becca and I had really once been as small and sweet as my father portrayed us.

By and by, these few happy scenes faded into smoke themselves. New York burned slowly. Our Upper East Side sidewalk smoldered. The destruction carried into the next sketchbook, which began with smoke. But then the curves straightened, the lines became thicker and darker, and began to bound controlled hash marks. There was a narrower street, and ragged, blocky buildings. One—a cross between a birthday cake and a prison—loomed above the rest. Another page showed a close-up of the interior of a streetcar. The picture seemed to focus on one tired, middle-aged couple who sat close together, looking out the window. All the severely Slavic faces seemed to be staring at them. Their faces were drawn in more detail than the others. The man had an unmistakably Jewish nose, wore a cap low over his eyes, and looked sort of like my father—as did the little boy sitting beside them. Was the boy my father? Was the older couple my grandparents?

I picked up the next book. There were sketches of Goldov at his easel, and sketches of the Galuth Museum. For some reason, in a couple sketches Hasidim were lighting candles in the gallery. There
were studies of some of the Galuth paintings, including the one where the girl was thrown from the train. There were detail studies of the people's faces, including the falling woman. Goldov and his museum were apparently important in my father's life, though the man himself made me nervous. I didn't like the bitter way he talked about my father, nor how he had tried to weasel my mother for money. He had probably just sent me to Mendy to get me out of his hair; if he knew Alojzy had this full storage space, he would have come to Mendy himself and tried to get the key, so he could loot anything of value.

Alojzy's drawings were nothing like Goldov's paintings. While Goldov's work was pure artifice and contained no meaning, Alojzy's drawings were packed full of emotion and information. If anything, they were closer to Galuth's paintings. They seemed to depict the same world, in some ways, though Al's drawings were more brutal, less full of hope. But then, black ink is a harsher medium than oil paint.

A significant portion of this book was devoted to sketches of West Fourth Street, clearly made from behind Alojzy's table. There were the book tables, Mendy and the other booksellers, and all the pretty girls passing by. Then West Fourth Street became Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, and the book tables were replaced with the stalls of the
shuk
. Then the
shuk
was in ruins, as bombs exploded and left body parts on the street. Then the explosions were in the desert, and the bodies wore helmets. An Arab girl lay dead in the sand. Then a beautiful woman with long dark hair lay naked—but very much alive—on a couch in an apartment. There were pages and pages of sketches of her.

In the next book, there were more soldiers, and men in suits carrying the same guns as the soldiers. One dead soldier's face appeared over and over. He had appeared sporadically in the previous books, but filled up nearly half of this one. He was in his thirties or forties, with a narrow face, a sharp nose, tight black curls, and, in some pictures, a thin mustache. Because he wore an IDF uniform in many of the pictures, I assumed he was Jewish, but he looked very Middle Eastern, and was probably Mizrahi. In other pictures, he wore flashy civilian clothes. Sometimes he was in the desert. Sometimes he lay on a
dock. Always, he was dead. His eyes never opened, even when he was standing upright in a scene with living people.

The last several pages of this book were blank.

Earlier, I thought the postcard drawing might lead me to my father. Now I had found hundreds more of his drawings. Surely the answers I wanted were all in here. Alojzy had put down the keys to his whole life, his whole history. I just needed to make sense of it. He hadn't made it easy. People and things that should be in Israel were in New York, and vice versa. Everything seeped into everything else. Some pictures had detailed backgrounds—I thought of how I'd tried, and failed, to place the freighter picture the day before—but other drawings floated in white space, or were bounded by indistinct hash marks, for purely compositional reasons. Looking through the sketchbooks was exhausting and overwhelming.

I sat in the quiet storage space, an interstitial zone between the painful—and hopefully revelatory—world of the sketchbooks and the outside world where people went about their business. Occasional footsteps and clattering sounds broke through to me. At one point, the clattering was in the same row as my space, and shook my walls. I heard a protracted, hollered exchange in a language I didn't recognize. It seemed that each of the two voices was coming from behind a different one of my walls. There was a crash, and then some laughter.

I wondered if maybe the facility had employees patrolling. This thought made me nervous, although I supposed I had a claim to the contents of the space, if not the space itself, and therefore had some sort of right to be in there. If Alojzy was “presumed dead,” I was a “presumed” legal heir. But then again, my father was probably not supposed to be sleeping in a storage unit in the first place. Was his bill paid up? Maybe he skipped town owing money, or a new bill had accumulated since he left. People were probably doing shadier things than I was in this place, late at night, but that was not actually the most comforting of thoughts. Keeping a loaded gun at hand might not be a bad idea after all. My father had it here for a reason. Maybe because he knew dangerous people were looking for him.

I fumbled with the magazine, but still couldn't figure out how to get it off. The latch I thought was a release wouldn't budge. I didn't want to force it, in case it wasn't the release. In the end, I just inserted one bullet directly into the chamber with my fingers, and slammed the bolt closed. The safety had been left in the “fire” position. I clicked it to “safe.”

Sitting back down on the bed, I placed my father's gun across my lap. He couldn't really be dead, could he? I felt his presence too strongly for that to be true. Two old men I'd just met believed he was dead, but what did they know? Goldov would clearly say anything to squeeze money out of our family. Mendy came off as better intentioned, but his world was confined primarily to one street, and his knowledge was built on little more than the rumors that circulated in that street. In fact, Mendy had said that he heard the rumor from Goldov. So where had Goldov heard it in the first place, if he hadn't made it up? Did he have some other angle or motivation I couldn't see, besides his simple greed? Did he have a reason to lie? Or did he have information about Alojzy's fate he couldn't share?