The War Against the Assholes (24 page)

33

C
hief merit of running: you don't have any ideas. You just run. That's all there is. Your blood, your lungs, your feet. As a result, I don't remember when I first noticed the crows. I was almost home. I'd slowed to a jog. Figured I'd done about five miles. Enough to sweat off the smell of sex. In case I had to do any explaining to my parents. I began to construct a story that wasn't a lie. I spent the night at a friend's. Which friend, my father asked in my imagination. I didn't even like to lie hypothetically. So I said: you don't know them. It was downtown. Does this friend have a name, said my notional mother. That's when I saw the crows. A loose, whirling murder of them in the sky above Park. More than I'd ever seen in once place before. Crying and diving. Dipping to a roof. Seizing an eave. Launching up again. Other pedestrians noticed. A guy stopped near a proud blue mailbox to watch. Craned his head back. His grayish porkpie hat fell into the gutter. “Fucking crows,” he said as he retrieved it. No purer illustration of human nature. The hat matched his suit, though. I would have been pissed too. More crows joined the mass. Broken, inky, linear streams. Hurtling across the blue, blue sky to join the congregation. I sped up. Running as fast as I could. My lungs burning.

Human din and buzz. A male voice saying above the ground notes, “Get back, please.” Hoarse cries of the crows. All sizes. Tiny daws. Huge deaconly ravens. A loose crowd around my building door. That's what I saw. An ambulance. That's what I saw. The crows circling overhead. Clatter of wings. Their repeated, delighted cries. The mottled, whirling shadow they cast. Two paramedics, both bald, were guiding two stretchers through the building doors. On each a body in a black bag. A garbage bag, I thought. “Can we get a little room, please,” said the fatter paramedic. He was voluntarily bald: a shaved, shiny scalp, ­stubble just visible. His name tag read
MARUCCI
. “These marriage,” said the thinner paramedic. He was involuntarily bald: a gray fringe encircled the top of his neck. His name tag said
LEVINSON
. They both saw me staring. “What you want, kid,” said Levinson. He had an accent. Not French. Not Spanish. Couldn't place it. “What's your name,” said Marucci, “what's your name.” He had an accent. Brooklyn. “What do you mean,” I said. “Is your name Mike Wood,” said Marucci. “What,” I said. “Kid, we talk to you,” said Levinson. They took hold of one gurney. Levinson lifted it over the lip of the ambulance. Marucci shoved it the rest of the way in. Why do corpses need an ambulance, I thought. Levinson lifted the second gurney up over the lip of the ambulance. Marucci shoved it the rest of the way in. Its metal cried out against the metal of the first gurney. The crows cried out above. “Listen, Mike,” said Marucci, “this isn't what you think. You're not in any trouble.” “Trouble,” I said. I couldn't get my breath. There's only one reason paramedics talk to you. When you're the next of kin. I was having trouble catching my breath. “No, I'm just late, I'm just late,” I was saying. The faces in the crowd around the ambulance door: solemn. Secretly delighted. That's human nature. To love the tragedy of others.

The crows swooped and cried out. Also in delight. I recognized people from my building: the Changs, from eighteen B. Herman Brown, who was over ninety and still wore a sharp-creased sky-blue suit every day. He was literally about five feet tall. If that. None of them would look me in the face. “What happened,” I kept saying, “what happened.” Levinson took me by the shoulder. “Kid, we try to tell you.” His blue sleeve rode up his arm. I saw a tattoo there: a rifle. An old rifle. “You have a gun tattooed on your arm,” I said, “I just got a tattoo.” He pulled his sleeve down. “Don't worry,” said Marucci. “Everything is going to be fine.” Levinson slipped through the crowd. I was starting to cry. I tried not to. Those two black bags. It's humiliating to cry in public. Even when you don't have any choice. I was taller and broader-shouldered than both the paramedics. Than most of the people in the crowd. Garbage bags. “They need to redesign those,” I choked out. My molars locked. “Human beings are better than garbage.” “Kid, what are you talking about,” said Marucci.

Not to be touched.
A lie.
Not to be touched.
If he'd hurt them, my mother or father, I thought, I would disembowel him. I'd buy a ­hunter's knife and disembowel him. “Like a deer,” I said.
Like a deer
,
said an agreeing inner voice. Weight of the haft in my palm. Weight of the blade in the air. My vision constricted. White fuzz at the edges. “Shit, you faint,” I heard Levinson say. Then the crowd right in front of us opened and I saw my parents standing there. Flanking Marucci. The crows screaming and screaming away. My sight stopped failing. The white roar I'd heard ceased. Although I went on weeping. Out of relief. Maybe simple exhaustion. They wore the same clothes they had on when they'd left for the movies. The flesh beneath my mother's eyes inflated and torn looking. Though it was whole. Lack of sleep. Tears.

She walked up and slapped me across the face. “Where were you,” she said. She's short. Not strong. Her slap did not hurt. I was grateful for it. It stopped the tears. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I should have called.” “You are royally screwed, mister,” said my father. “Royally. Where were you,” he said.
I saw someone come back from the dead. I found out that I'm an accessory to premeditated murder
.
I saw the end of one battle in a war and the start of another. I had sex for the first time.
“Was with a friend,” I said. “Oh, a friend,” said my mother, “isn't that nice, a friend. You didn't answer your phone. We were up all night. We called five hospitals. We called the cops.” My father was covering his mouth with his hand. “What happened,” I said. “It's Nathan and Dunya Lorbeerbaum,” said my mother. “Other than that we don't know.” Levinson slammed the ambulance hatch doors closed. “Ready for rolling,” he said. Marucci said, “Sir. Ma'am.” The ambulance left. Sirens on. Lights on. Everybody makes way for the dead.

The crowd dispersing. Their coagulate shadow coming apart. Their cries getting softer and weaker in the hard, blue distance. My parents and I stood there. “If you need to spill, then spill,” said my father, “we know you. We know it can't be anything that bad.” I saw Potash fall. Wounds in his palms. Heard him sigh after the bullets had shattered his skull and pierced his brain. His blood hit my pants cuffs. The tremendous night above. The berries. The river. The temple. The roar. All of it. “It's just,” I said. “What,” said my father. “I can't,” I said. “Can't what,” said my mother. “I get all worried and knotted up about school. Because I don't do as well as you want me to. I can tell I don't.” I hate lying. To my parents more than anyone else. I am good at it despite that. You have to be. If you want to succeed in any art. The best lies also aren't full-on, full-blown lies. They're just irrelevant truths. “We know you work hard, Mike,” said my father. “I'm sorry,” my mother said. “No, I deserved it,” I said. True. Beyond any possible doubt. The fake poinsettia trembled in Henry's breath as we passed through the lobby door. “For this we pay maintenance,” said my father.

A long shower. I lost track of minutes. My hands pink and pruned. The ache from my run. From my sleepless night. From the art. They all mingled under the water. Hot as I could stand it. I leaned my forehead against the tiles. Smelled bleach. Shampoo. I let it all drain away. You learn to do that. If you play football. When you lose. When you get mauled and hurt. You leave it in the showers. You have to. Otherwise you can't go on. This was part of Coach Madigan's homiletic cycle. He was dead right. So it drained and dripped away. Except for the pain. I was used to that. I hadn't had a nosebleed in weeks. Which I took to be a sign. Not of improvement. Simple adaptation, maybe. I wondered why the crows had been watching. A sick surveillance effort. An attempt to send a message. I didn't care. I was home. I had no idea what to do about Alabama. Call her. Not call her. I assumed the latter. You don't necessarily want, I thought, to talk to the person you just slept with. Given everything else. I turned off the water. Inhaled the steam. My parents used this one brand of soap, Waterman's. It smelled like almonds. I toweled off. I wrapped my lower half.

My father was waiting for me in my room. His hands behind his back. “Hey,” he said when I came in. “Hey, Dad,” I said. “This friend of yours. That you were with last night. Have we met,” said my father. “I don't think you've met them,” I said. I knew
them
was ungrammatical. I didn't want to say anything about Alabama if I didn't have to. Didn't want to be indiscreet. “Does this person have a name, or, perhaps, a gender,” said my father. Water dripped from my chin. “Alabama,” I said. “Lovely name,” said my father. He whipped his hands out from behind his back. He was holding an azure box of condoms.
SPARTAN
. A guy with a crested helm on the outside. “I am too young to be a grandfather, as I said,” said my father, “I am in the prime of my fucking life, in fact. And don't tell your mother I gave you these. Because she might slay us both.” I took the box. My father shook my hand. I heard him humming that song—about the sadder but wiser girl—as he trundled down the hallway to the kitchen.

I read the box copy. Powerful stuff. Pleasure and safety. Spermicidal lubricant. All sounded good and necessary. I hid it in my sock drawer. I turned off the light. I lay down on my bed. I shut my eyes. A cold draft leaked in through the window next to my head. I hadn't drawn the curtain. Because it was only late morning. I almost fell asleep. The cold wind stroking my cheek. I stood at the edge of the great abyss. Sleep heals us. I used to be a sound sleeper. So I know. I remember standing at the edge of the great abyss, friendly as an ocean. Then I opened my eyes.

To my credit, I didn't say anything. I just looked. On my fire escape, still clad in her dark suit and white shirt, was Messaline. Leaning against the rail. Her raven perched next to her. Opening and closing its beak. She showed me her wrists. Free of the iron bracelets. She had her hair bound up. To reveal the full shining scar on her throat. A wound, now, to be proud of. I stood to face her. “What do you want,” I said. As quietly as I could. She looked me up and down. She smiled. Licked her lips. Good thing Hob was gay, I thought. Otherwise he'd have had no chance. My cock was stone-hard, yet again. Completely against my will. “What do you want,” I repeated. She pressed palm to window. I knew what I was supposed to do. I pressed mine to the corresponding spot. An image flooded into my head. Acidic. Blood-stinking. She stood in a living room, filled with pear-colored light. A picture on the wall, of an old man and an old woman standing on a beach. At one edge the pink eave of a hotel. At the other a potbellied stranger walking the surf line. The Lorbeerbaums. Who now kneeled coughing and gasping, grabbing their fat throats, at Messaline's feet. In front of a couch covered in rose-patterned cloth and one of those flesh-grabbing transparent covers old people use. The Lorbeerbaums flopped and thrashed. Their faces crimson. Their faces purple. Their tongues black. They stopped their struggle. They slumped at her feet. She lifted a boot and placed it on Mrs. Lorbeerbaum's neck. The show ended. I drew my hand back. I was freezing. As dead cold as if I'd been out there with her.

Messaline grinned. Rather, she showed me her teeth. White. Flawless.
Open the window
, I thought,
why not. Two in one day. You'd be a champ.
I heard my sick giggling. Her naked form. On the page of the book Mr. Stone had shown me. Her scar. Her fists. Her cold breath. I gave her the finger. She just kept smiling. Climbed onto the railing. Spread her arms. Shut her eyes. Bent her knees and dove backward. Arms stretched above her head. As though in victory. A black and pale flash. The raven took off. My breath was condensing in the air of my room. “The golden lion tamarin is a small New World monkey of the family Callitrichidae,” I heard a British voice say on our TV.

34

T
he most difficult maneuver in
The
Calendar of Sleights
is, in Erzmund's opinion, also the simplest. It is the last one he mentions, and he explains quite bluntly that most experts fail even to approach mastering it.
Only those who have truly understood my meaning
, he writes,
those who have cast off all doubt and hesitation, all posturing, will attain to this height of heights, this nonpareil. All things perfect are as excellent as they are rare.

It's called
THE TRIUMPH OF THE FOOL
. It requires two props, other than an unopened deck of cards. One is a wooden table,
as long as a vigorous man is tall and twice as wide
, in Erzmund's words. One is a sharp knife. The sleight is simplicity itself. You open the deck, having gotten an audience member to vouchsafe that it is, in fact, new and untampered with. You flex it in your nondominant hand, reverse-­bowing until the cards fountain into the air. Once they are all aloft, your bring the knife, in a long, swooping arc, down onto the table. The point enters the wood. Speared in the middle of the blade will be the Joker. The Fool. Erzmund provides no instructions on the mechanics of this sleight. He describes it more or less as I have. And it has baffled many accomplished magicians. There are numerous methods to achieve the effect. Retaining a joker with a palm or a reverse palm. Picking it from the air instead of piercing it with a blade. Purpose-built knives. Purpose-built tables. Or—and this is a common expedient—making a hash of it merely as a prelude to another sleight. Missing the Fool deliberately because you have arranged a duplicate to be drawn from a target's pocket or shoe.

None of these methods are sanctioned. None of them are, in fact, permitted. How do we know this? Erzmund does not name them in his account of the sleight; in every other sleight described in the
Calendar
he provides at least two sets of instructions on effecting it, through preparing the deck or through legerdemain.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE FOOL
he merely describes more or less as I have. Open the deck. Release the cards. Strike with the knife. Strike the Fool. The sleight itself is of course a joke. An assault on the idea, on the structure of the book. It can only be done properly through the unmediated use of the art. No hold-outs. No stock shuffles. No palms. No other impediment. I release the cards. I breathe deeply. I watch as the world slows down. I see the Fool fluttering his foolish flutter. I wait until he comes within the compass of my arm. I strike.
Harder than you dare
, says Erzmund. Always.

Mr. Stone. Potash. Vincent and Hob. John Charthouse and god knows who else. You carry things with you. They accompany you. Will you or nill you. It's human fate. The dead live alongside their killers. I woke up. I went to school. I studied the daylight arts. That's another term from Erzmund, who implies that he left school as early as he could and took to the roads. I came home. I studied other arts. I slept. The wind and the rain. Who said that? It's in Shakespeare. Sister Faith Hope sang it aloud when we came to the song in
Twelfth Night
. A sweet, simple, piping melody. She was heavyset and heavy jawed, with a fringe of mustache across her fleshy upper lip. Her voice: pure. Bodiless. Like light. “When that I was and a little tiny boy,” she sang, “with a hey, ho the wind and the rain / A foolish thing was but a toy / For the rain it raineth every day.” We all shut up. We all would have preferred her singing to be mockable. It was not. I had learned, after a long delay and totally by chance, the name of the song Charthouse had whistled in his moments of distraction or doubt. The rain it raineth every day. Especially that spring.

Thunderstorms, more or less constant. Slashing rain. They filled Saint Cyprian's with a gray light. Which I found almost as unendurable as Hob's absence. Or the way everyone accepted it. As though he'd never existed. As though he'd erased himself completely from memory. I tried, once, out of that perverse impulse to toss a brick through a window that has dogged me my entire adult life, and began, I think, in that stormlit, tumultuous spring, asking Sister Immaculata when he would be back. In world history. She was explaining Pol Pot and his massacres. He killed people because they wore glasses. In his opinion this made them intellectuals. Little has changed since then, except we have fewer massacres. Sister Immaculata looked at me. Her eyebrows cocked. “Mr. Wood, please keep your attention to the topic at hand. I've never taught a student by that name,” she said. Greg Gilder snorted. I swung my head to stare at him. He shut his wide, weak mouth. I never tried again. No point in kicking. What's past is past and doesn't matter. You could call that, too,
THE TRIUMPH OF THE FOOL
. Futility. Whatever you like.

Or consider those marks on Mr. Stone's wall. Casualties. Their only monument gone now, I imagined. I hadn't counted them. Hadn't had time. Now I will never know, I thought, even the number of our cause's dead. You can't waste time on the unanswerable, however. The living will live. Even though the dead remain at their heels. Football continued. The postseason. Workouts and scrums. Coach Madigan shuttled us up to his mother's house twice a month, that spring, and set us to work cleaning her gutters of leaves and other filth. I found cans of beer. I found a bird's torn-off wing, a white knuckle of bone protruding. The feathers stiff and black. All the other kids on the team, except Dalmacio Zingales, complained. I didn't mind. If my grandmother had gutters, I would have wanted help cleaning them. She lived in a project. An old-people project. She barely had windows. She refused to move out to Long Island. My father had tried and tried to sell her on the idea. You'd think what with her dislike of blacks and Hispanics she'd want to be in a majority-white town. No dice. You can't predict how people will act. Although she did get completely wasted at Easter dinner and launch into a new tirade. This time about Albanians. “I'm telling you it's a nation of psychopaths, Tommy,” said my grandmother. A pink scrap of lamb dangling from her fork. The color of the Lorbeerbaums' faces before they died. That much I remembered. “Ma, we're celebrating the resurrection of the savior here,” said my father. “God wants us to be honest,” said my grandmother.

Spring. I hate it. I'm a summer, fall, and winter man. Rain, mud, the raw hurry of sticky leaves opening: not for me. The slick face of the season. Why does spring become the metaphor for freshness and love in this world? It's nothing of the kind. It has a dreadful and improvisational smile, and a vegetal reek. That's not love. Love is unequivocal. On the first day of April, some prick from the park service located and captured Irmgard. No one believed the reports at first. They all thought it was a prank.
WELL, OWL BE
! So ran a front-page
Post
headline. The picture showed the aforementioned prick from the park service—ID'd in the caption as Dr. Henry Garbauskas, fifty-one—holding Irmgard. She looked the same as she did the night we had released her. He held her upside down, by her legs. Her feathers violet. Her eyes dull yellow. Garbauskas wore green shorts. Shit-brown socks up to his white, fistlike patellae. A mustache, badger-colored. He had no head-neck differential. By which I mean his head was the same width as his gawky, knobbed neck. “What won't they think of next,” said my father, “a purple owl.” I wanted to explain. That once Garbauskas ran his tests he'd be in for a tremendous deflation. You could tell from the photo that finding Irmgard represented the high point of Garbauskas's life so far. The set of his socks said so. The messy mustache. I couldn't think of a way to say all this that wouldn't make me sound like a schizophrenic. So I kept my mouth shut. If you're a reanimated piece of taxidermy, your appetites probably no longer torture you. Survival comes easy. “They caught her near Belvedere Castle,” he said, “a classy dame.” He stopped reading. Waved at me with his tennis racket. He'd finally had to break down and buy new sneakers. Bright orange. Yellow trim. He still went over them with a toothbrush. They looked sharp. They chirped stiffly at every step. The cry of the new. My mother was in Hong Kong. She missed the owl story.

People can explain anything to themselves. Without too much effort. Even Dr. Garbauskas, when he found out there was nothing in Irmgard other than bones and horsehair, would regard it as a queer neurological phenomenon. Improper taxidermy. Reflex action. No more. Alabama said, “That guy looks like a child molester” first thing when I showed her the paper. She was correct. “Well, owl be,” she said, “that's actually kind of great.” Also correct. “Mark and Lena hate this paper,” she went on. “They make a big deal out of how terrible it is. Fascistic. Mark says that. He calls a lot of things fascistic. You can't take him seriously.” I enjoy the
Post
. It tells good stories. That's what we seek out, in this unpredictable life. It's how, in fact, I had ended up in the impossible position I occupied that spring. Alabama and I walked along in silence. “So she's immortal now,” I said. “Until they cut her up for science,” said Alabama. “Vincent didn't think this through,” I said.

She was waiting for me outside my building, smoking and watching the silvery threads of the rain. I had not expected her. The day after she took my virginity, I worked up the nerve to call her. Managed to stop myself. Didn't seem right. I could imagine her face when she heard me, blank, serene. I think that's what stopped me. Or her gun. Hard to say. I admit that when I wasn't practicing, when I was alone, before sleep, listening to the thunder or the wind, watching the spastic white the lightning cast on the walls—of course I was thinking of her. When I jerked off. When I ran. But every day that passed without seeing her made me proud. I'd overcome a stupid, childish need. To hold on, maybe.

I thought I saw her once. I was running my usual route through the park. North toward the Meer, then back south through the Pinetum. It was almost dark. I had my hood drawn tight against the air. On an upthrust keel of schist, as I panted through its shadow, I saw a slim figure. Male or female: could not say. Definitely wearing a leather jacket. When I spun to look (without stopping; I love to run backward because of its intense stupidity) I saw nothing and no one, just a wavering leaf of light from a security lamp. Yes, I wanted to fuck her again. Or just to be with her. But more than that, I wanted to talk. The chief need. A knot in my throat. Hob. Vincent. Potash. Charthouse. When I slipped into sleep, I dreamed about him and about Hob. The same dream for each. Charthouse appeared in a painting, an ornate oil painting. Hung on the wall of a room that stretched infinitely away from me in every direction. His eyes shut and his lips pressed together. He wore a coat that buttoned high over the chest and swept away in two long tails. Green. The color of the
Calendar
. I learned later that this kind of coat is called a frock coat. Hob I never saw. Only heard: I was sitting in a damp forest, on the wet ground, with huge grayish trees looming overhead. From the impenetrable thicket came the choked, trilling sound of a child sobbing and crying out. I knew it was his voice. Though I had no basis for knowing so.

The rain hit my hood. Alabama didn't offer me space under her umbrella. She did offer me a cigarette. Just a Camel. Nothing salvatory there. “So,” I said. Alabama just started walking. She didn't answer when I asked where we were going. She kept scanning the air. Hob used to do that. Three drenched crows sat on a branch above us. Definitely watching. “Still at it,” I said. We plodded on. I saw no point in asking any more questions. I finished my smoke. She offered me another, without speaking.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE FOOL
. Literal-sounding. Actually a paradox. The Fool gets knifed. How can he triumph? Maybe by being wounded or dying. That's one theory. Maybe the man or woman with the knife is the fool. That's another theory. Maybe the Fool, in this case, is Erzmund, and his triumph consists in nothing more than completing your education in the art. As far as anyone can be educated in it. No one knows. No one will know.

We walked to the park. We didn't speak. We climbed a hill. To a shelf of rock. When we reached the crest I saw that it overlooked my running route. “Have you been following me,” I said. “I had to make sure,” she said, “like double sure.” Kicking a rhomboid of free stone. On the lawn below us, the rain glistened. I wasn't insulted. She had a valid point. “I passed muster with Charthouse,” I said. I remembered: the subway car full of rain. I remembered: the tunnel full of lightning. I wanted to go on record. “Yeah, well,” she said, “he's seen better days.” She picked up the stone. “We've all seen better days,” I said. “How much,” she said, “you wanna bet I can hit that guy in the purple hat with this rock.” Her target had jogged into view as she spoke. The rain had emptied the park otherwise. She hefted the dirty chunk of quartz in her palm. She hurled it. “No bet,” I said. We waited. The quartz flew through the air. Out across the fields. In a huge, high arc. We lost sight of it in the gray rain. We lost sight of it against the blank sky. “Come on,” Alabama said under her breath. The guy in the purple hat started freaking out. Stopped. Looked around. Jabbed his head back and forth. It was clear she'd scored a hit. “You owe me like a billion dollars,” she said, “that was a sterling throw.” The hat man ran on. When he neared us he didn't even spare a glance. A red trickle crept down his face, next to his left eye. “Just tell me what you want,” I said. Mostly because I was wet and cold. “We need to go see a man about a dog,” she said. And I'd been standing there worried that she was, in fact, going to shoot me. For an inscrutable betrayal. Not of her. Of a principle I didn't even know had been put in place.