This Side of Brightness (31 page)

It's the first time in years anyone called me that: Mister Walker. But, see, that name makes me feel like I got nothing in my body, like I been carved out, so I just leave the room. I was drinking pretty heavy then. I had this gin in the room. I'm just climbing into the bottle. Not even listening at the door or nothing. Then the door closes and I hear Dancesca in the kitchen. She's rumbling in the cupboards. I'm looking at the aquarium. She has a knife when she comes into my room but she doesn't use the knife, it's just in case. She stands in front of me with the knife. And then she just slaps me and leaves my face in my shoulder, and then she moves away and the sting of her hand is in my face and I'm thinking, Slap me on the other side, slap me on the other side, but she's gone. She's in the other bedroom. Slap me on the other side, slap me on the other side. I went and stood in the doorway. I'm watching her. She reaches for the suitcases. She loads her clothes without folding them, stuffs two of the suitcases tight. She clamps down the locks. Then she moves past me as if I'm nothing but air. Lenora's not around, she's still at school. Dancesca, she opens Lenora's cupboard and holds up a training bra. You recognize this? she says to me, and then she buries her head once more and goes to filling the suitcase. She loads all of Lenora's clothes and then rips the sheet of blue plastic off the wall, gathers the photos from the ground, and throws the one of me at me. And she says to me, Pervert. You're nothing but a pervert.

And I can't say nothing.

I'm paralyzed, like I told you.

She ain't a bitch.

She ain't a bitch no way.

No, I didn't touch her there.

No!

Yeah, just the armpits. Not anywhere else.

I never touched that. Not the nipple.

Just around there.

I didn't—

She was just a child.

Just a child, Angie. Just a child.

I didn't mean nothing by it.

I never even saw her once after that. Dancesca, she took her from school and went to her folks and she won't listen to anything I got to say when I try to phone her and then she disappears altogether; they say she's not around, both of them gone, they say she's in New York, doesn't want to talk to me, but I know where she is, I know she's in Chicago.

I been thinking about goin' up there, yeah. Sometime.

Angie.

Angie!

No. No way. I never touched her there, I swear, I never did, I swear on it, and that's the truth, never there.

It wasn't that, it wasn't a hard-on, it was nothing like that.

I wasn't touching her like you think.

No.

Listen!

I mean, it's what I been trying to say. I'd be there in her room and I'd be touching her shoulders and my head'd be spinning and I'd be out of control and thinking something else. I mean, it wasn't a hard-on, you don't have to believe me if you don't want to, it was something else, but Dancesca wouldn't listen and nobody would listen; I guess I didn't listen myself, I was pretty fucked up in the head it was going thump thump thump thump like I told you.

I been thinking on it more and more. I ain't never told anybody this before. I mean, we all got a history in us, yeah? A man is what he loves and that's the reason he loves it.

That ain't shit.

No.

Ah, Angie, no.

No, Angie.

Don't do that.

I mean, look.

Out there.

Can't you see? See, I told you the sun'd come up. See. Now you can see it. It's gray and all, but ain't it nice? Hey. Angie.

Shit, I mean that's what I meant. You said you hadn't seen it before, Angie.

Angie.

You said you wanted to see the sea.

Fuck candy.

Yeah, that's my goddamn candy. I ain't got any goddamn candy. And I ain't gonna get any either. Fuck candy.

Fuck candy!

Angie.

Hey, Angie. You can't go there.

He'll kill you. Angela!

You dropped my goddamn sock.

Angie.

Angela.

It wasn't like you think.

Damn, Angie. Angela. An-ge-la!

I was lifting him out of her.

*   *   *

For weeks after Dancesca leaves, Clarence Nathan sleeps out in other parts of the city. His hair is short, and he can feel the cold bite at his ears. In Riverside Park he stuffs a red-haired man with his Swiss Army knife. He has seen the man before; he is homeless too. Clarence Nathan is sitting on the park bench by the Hudson, and Redhair taps him on the shoulder—“Spare a cigarette, bud?”—and Clarence Nathan asks him to tap him on the other shoulder for balance. Redhair laughs and reaches forward and steals the lit cigarette from his mouth. The blade is small and pathetic, but it slides in and slides out and Redhair stands there as a small patch of blood spreads on the stomach of his T-shirt. Clarence Nathan runs off and later stabs himself while on a bus. He sees Redhair a few weeks later and Redhair says he is going to kill him, but Clarence Nathan tosses him two packs of cigarettes and that is it; he never sees Redhair again. He wanders around the city in an ache. The sole of his construction boots undoes itself and he sticks it with glue that he steals from a drugstore. One afternoon he sees Cricket in the distance, walking through the park, and he hides in weeds down near the embankment. Junkies and male hookers are in abundance in the park, but they don't ask him if he wants a blow job anymore; he is broken down and head-hung and dirty and covers his muscled torso with long shirts so he doesn't have to stare at his scars.

Sometimes there is a mother and child in the park. He moves up quickly behind them and then covers his face and passes them, waits by a lamppost or a park bench, turns around, and sees that it isn't them.

On an afternoon of torpor he sees a pigeon wing its way through the park; it swoops down toward the bottom of the hill and flies through the ironwork gate, and he wonders if the pigeon lives in the tunnel. He descends the embankment that leads to the gate. Some flowers are in bloom by the crab-apple trees. His feet slide in the muck. The gate is locked. Clarence Nathan gazes at the ironwork and at a bar that is bent backward. He waits a long time for his heart to quiet itself; then he bends his body and nudges his way through the gap. He stands for a long time on the metal platform, like he and his grandfather had once done. All is quiet. The tunnel is high and wide and gracious. Goose bumps on his skin when he descends the steps. He moves into the shadowy depths, across a heap of garbage. He opens a bottle and sips from it and looks up at the ceiling. He gazes along the tunnel and then he feels it: it rises right through him; it is primitive and necessary; and he knows now that he belongs here, that this is his place.

Shuffling along, he sees a dead tree planted in a mound of dirt and he sees murals lit from above. Further up the tunnel, he wonders about the world that is walking above him, all those solitary souls with their banalities and their own peculiar forms of shame. Dancesca is up there. And Lenora. Somewhere, he doesn't know where. He has tried calling Chicago, but the phone gets slammed down. He has even thought of buying a bus ticket, but the ache is too tremendous within him; he can go nowhere except here; he likes it here, this darkness. He steps on a rail and can feel a slight rumble in his foot, and a few seconds later there is a train with its horn blasting and he steps aside to watch it pass and all the commuters are at their windows unaware and then the train is gone and all that is left is the imprint of its red lights on his eyes and he goes over to the wall and he lies beneath a mural of Salvador Dali's Melting Clock and he has no idea what time it is.

He looks up through the ceiling grill, watching as the light leaves the sky. He runs his hands over his body and then punches a fist into the tunnel wall and does it again, and each time he can feel a crack in his hands. He keeps on thumping until there is blood on both fists and then he mixes the blood together and keeps on thumping until he is exhausted—he even slaps at it with his elbows—and then he stumbles into the blackest blackness and there is not a sound in the tunnel.

Clarence Nathan can feel the pain in his hands but he doesn't care; he wishes he could murder them, annihilate them, suicide them; they form no meaningful connection to his wrists—more than anything he wants to get rid of his hands.

Returning to where he saw the pigeon flying, the cantankerous dark all around him, he bumps into a pillar. With all his remembered gymnastics, he climbs the pillar and finds himself on a narrow catwalk and walks along it, welcoming the pain in his hands—he doesn't even feel it anymore, it is part of him, organic—and he is high up in the tunnel, all spectacular balance still in him; there is no sign of anything or anyone, it is cold and quiet and otherworldly, and he is amazed to find that the walkway leads to an elevated room, and he opens his hands to the dark room and falls there and curls up into himself and he doesn't sleep.

*   *   *

The thing about it is, Angie, a man needs time to bury his hands. You listening? I could go bury my hand right here if I wanted to. Just watch me. See how it disappears. Right down here in the sand. Both of them. Angie. Angela. Where the goddamn hell you gone, anyway? Angie? See how they disappear.

chapter 15

our resurrections aren't what they used to be

He wakes alone on the Coney Island sand, high tide just five feet from him, pieces of plastic and filthy foam carried on the waves, all unaccustomed water noise around him, an anemic wolfhound sniffing at his feet. The dog runs off when he stirs. His toes are freezing in his boots, and he remembers giving Angela his socks. Moving to rub the sand from his hair, he is shocked at its shortness. He stands and shakes the sand from his clothes and the blankets, reaches in his pocket for his sunglasses, but they have been smashed, cracked into two pieces. He tries to balance the glasses on his ears but they fall off and he leaves them in the sand and looks out to sea, sensing a shift in the weather, morning redness far out on the horizon. It is strange to him how quickly the sun rises, the one abrupt moment before it moves into lethargy, its arc of slowness, its daily grind.

He turns his back and walks from the beach.

Up on the boardwalk there are some early joggers. A few straggling lovers hung over from nightclubs. A Russian Jew with a black hat and long beard and ringlets. A man with a silver cart is selling coffee and doughnuts.

Reaching inside his overcoat pocket, he still has, from Faraday's funeral, a five-dollar bill with pins through it. He buys coffee and a bagel, walks a short way along the boardwalk, coughs and spits. More blood in his phlegm than ever before. He feels the heat of the coffee sear through him, and his stomach has shrunken so much he can eat only half the bagel. He tosses the rest to the wolfhound, which is still down below on the sand. The wolfhound sniffs at the half bagel and then turns and lopes away. In the distance, he hears the rumble of trains on the elevated track. He counts out a dollar twenty-five cents and makes his way toward the station. Slush at the edge of the sidewalk. The palms of his hands are scabbed over now from where he cut them.

He tips the rim of his wool hat and allows two old ladies to go past him.

“Good morning, ladies,” he says, and they ignore him, scuttle on.

He vaults the turnstile and nobody stops him. In the train he sits in the second carriage from the front, in the middle of the row of seats, away from the subway map. The train is full of well-dressed suits and skirts, one woman powdering her face. He notices that all the seats are taken except those around him, and he knows how badly he must smell, and for a moment he thinks about standing up and giving his seat to a woman—any woman—and then going to stand between the two carriages to let the wind drive the scent of him away. But instead he stretches out on the seat, curls his body, puts his hands in under his head, and rocks with the rhythm of the D-train. He has emptied himself of history, and everything Clarence Nathan Walker has ever known in his life stands between here and a tunnel.

*   *   *

“And ol' Sean Power, Lord save his soul, ol' Power said to me once that God just went ahead and let one go, God went ahead and farted. But I don't like to think on it that way, son, even though it's funny and it makes me laugh. Me, I think on it as something else altogether. And sometimes at night, see, I can still feel my whole self rising up through that river.”

*   *   *

He waits at the gate, in the sharp silence of a last snowfall, picks up a clump of snow and scrubs his face, feels refreshed, vital, alert. He has spent the morning at the bus station—fifteen dollars one way, they told him. In his pocket he has twenty dollars. Bottles and cans. Redemption money.

There is a single set of footprints in the snow, and he knows they belong to Angela. He places his boots in the prints and lengthens them.

Removing both his overcoats, Clarence Nathan squeezes his way through the gate, stands on the metal platform, and catches his breath as he puts the coats back on. Along the tunnel the brilliant blue light shafts slip in and out of the darkness. The flakes of snow make their long familiar journeys through the light—their spin, their fall, their gathering. He moves down the steps and walks quickly from light shaft to light shaft, enjoying the brief rage of brightness.

A shorn man wrapped in the darkest of coats, the inside lining flapping down beyond his thighs, he looks thin and sculpted by some terrible human degradation, his construction boots wrapped in tape, his purple hat tight down over his ears, motes of dust in the light shaft crashing off him at all angles as if the light itself mightn't even want him. Yet he moves with a strange fluidity, a sureness, balancing on the edge of a rail as he goes. Clarence Nathan has revisited himself, arrived full circle, each shadow of himself leading to the next, which is just another shadow in the fun-house darkness. He shivers when he sees a small rat moving at the side of the tracks as if it might accompany him the rest of his life. Picking up a handful of pebbles, he flings them at the rat and walks on.