The Grey
Life, Chapter XII
As
we grew older, Patrick came to love playing on the stretch of subway
tracks that ran above Jerome Avenue, just off the Cross Bronx
Expressway. The scaly, metallic skin of its underside and the iron
girders that supported it ran over the thick pavement like a great
awning, yawning, like a cradle, so that as a young child I remember
having the impression that there was a tunnel there, that in some
places on the earth where human beasts dwell they have spurned the
sun and come to live like rats. New York City gave me odd impressions
like that at times, not all of them negative, because the place is
constantly moving about, shifting, contorting even, as if in the
throes of the most violent seizure. It is a place of very little
space, and so crowded with character. It's very cordoned off, and at
times to move several blocks was like changing worlds. Human beasts
are beasts of the wild, though - it's born in us - and there are
consequences when so much of the country's hopelessly pragmatic
population lives within a couple hundred square miles of each other.
The scathing coldness of the fanaticism of its population lends even
the oppresively hot and humid summers an aspect of chiliness, the
summers of haze and the people swimming through the thick air that
just chokes you, swimming farcically on the floor at the bottom of
the ocean. But some of the people there are also capable of the
greatest warmth, many more at least seldomly. The pathetic tragedy of
everyday American, modern life has come to be played out so
brilliantly on its streets that you can bill it the Rome of the
American Empire. But of course New York City appeared all too
dangerous and bleak after I graduated from college, its vagrant
shifting a peril in my acute need for stability, and so it grew quite
impossible to ever want to go back there.
But
Patrick, I imagine, would have stayed in New York City all his life
had he grown up. He seemed to just wear the city, to have been born
of it. It seemed to exist in him, to express itself through him. The
violent and agressive needs of the rats condemned to live there, to
never leave, trying to trap you in their virility, these were all
manifested in him. I think a lot of it had to do with Grandmother, of
course. I associate Grandmother with a great many things, and there
are reasons for that. Of all the people I have known in my life I
think I have come to some sort of peace or understanding of most of
them, but not Grandmother. Grandmother was hidden behind a grand
facade that was constantly appended to. It was difficult to see
through her.
Patrick
was moody from a young age. As a child barely capable of speech he
would often cry for milk and then refuse to drink. He would splash
water on mother when she bathed him, goading her until she hit him,
and then he would sit himself at the bottom of the tub and let out
the most horrid screeching noises. Mother couldn't stand the putrid
wailing. She would scream tyrannically at him to stop and slap him
some more. But he'd just screech louder and mother would hit him
harder, until she would catch sight of me standing in the doorway
looking at her. I must admit, I developed as a young child a strong
facination for watching others lose their shit, probably because that
was the only way I could deal with the fact that all around me the
people were doing it every day.
That
Patrick was younger than I seemed to make little difference in those
colored days of childhood before either of us had been exposed to the
adult reality that dulls our capacity for imagination. Paul of Tarsus
outdid himself, it would seem. It the tempestuous homelife in which
we had been bred we had only each other. We learned to love each
other by not seeming to care, because you can't mourn what you never
loved, nor miss what you never had. That is envy, and there was
nothing envious about our lives whatsoever, although there were many
who would look upon my father's house and the cars in the garage and
think differently.
He
was six years old when Grandmother came to visit that first time, and
after she accosted me in my bedroom she stopped by to see him as
well. She crept up on him while he was sleeping and stuffed a pillow
over his face. He panicked, of course, but his cries were muffled and
there was no air for him. After a moment Grandmother lifted the
pillow, an act which was immediately followed by a dutiful and
familiar shrieking. So familiar, perhaps, that mother never deigned
to investigate its cause.
"Stop
that!" Grandmother shouted at my brother, and when he did not
she started to beat him with her shoe. "Stop that horrid
shrieking, you demented little devil, you! Stop that, I say, or I'll
only hit you harder!" The walls were thin at home, I remember,
and that ghostly voice seeping through the walls sent chills racing
up my spine. After a while, he stopped, and I could hear nothing
more.
That
was the beginning. Over time, lost in a labyrinth of carefully
constructed lies, Patrick began to lose all the energy of a spoiled
louse who thinks he knows everything. Soon all traces of vigor had
dissipated, shed, stripped from his character, until by the time he
died he was nothing more than a shattered husk in the reigning
tradition of Aunt Dorothy.
The
next morning when I awoke I climbed out of bed to check on him. I may
have pretended he meant nothing to me, may have spat on him, perhaps,
but I also needed him to share the horror with me. And he was my
oldest companion. Of course, I did not understand then how much I
really needed him or why. All I knew was that Grandmother was much
worse than mother had ever been.
It
took a few minutes to overcome the fear that Grandmother would be
waiting outside the door for me. For a moment I could hear her thick,
heavy breathing, and was paralyzed. But the fear inherent in knowing
Grandmother was new and therefore not so strong. And things are
easier to face as a young child when there is sunlight. So I opened
my door quietly and listened for voices. Grandmother and mother were
speaking, I could hear, in the living room dowstairs.
"
- quite a production if I may say so myself," Grandmother's
brackish voice poured up the stairs, "and unnecessary at that!
Why, I was so upset that on my way out I almost hit him with the
car."
"Deserved
it."
"So
how is Robert, dear? I haven't spoken to him in such a long time."
Mother's
response was voluptuously menacing. "Fine, mother. He's at the
office."
"Why,
Rachel, does it upset you that he works so hard?"
"It
wouldn't if I was getting laid!"
I
shiver even now to think of mother and father having sex. The whole
thing seems to me rather digusting, and I am glad to know that it
didn't happen often. I hoped briefly that it was never when I was at
home, and then the whole thing slipped my mind entirely and I was
creeping past the stairwell toward Patrick's room. The distance was
considerable, especially for one so small as I, along a balcony that
looked over the living room and its long, comfortable couches. I kept
my head low and pressed myself against the far wall, well beyond the
range of their vision, trying to make as little noise as possible.
Their fetid voices rose to greet me out of the sea of nothingness off
to my left as from the throats of stony apparitions, chalky and faded
and not entirely there.
"Rachel,
really! I have no desire to hear about you and Robert engaged in the
sexual act."
"He's
never home," mother complained to Grandmother in answer. "It's
like I never married anybody except this goddamn house and the
children."
"I've
told you countless times you've the best of the three of you. I
always knew you would. I'm proud of you, too, living in a place like
this in the big city. You always were my favorite, even if it's
because one of your sisters is incontinent and the other dumber than
a drunk."
"It's
just that I'm not happy, mother. Sometimes I want to smother the kids
in their sleep, wait for Robert to come home and blow a hole through
his chest the size of California and run away."
Grandmother
snorted. "Run away where? Come on, darling, really. There's
nothing wrong with your life at all. You've got it better than anyone
in our family since the day my great-grandfather lost his slaves to
the Civil War. If it's those damned feminazis again -"
"Feminists,
mother," mother breathed in exasperation. "Feminists.
Feminazi sounds too lesbian."
"That's
because they are all lesbians, Rachel. Look, I'm telling you, I know.
I see them all the time on the television and on the bus. Shaved
heads and leather and the bitter looks on their faces. You can see
them eyeing each other and - uhhg! - the idea is rather nasty,
wouldn't you say?'
"No,
I would not say."
"Lord
have mercy. Is my favorite daughter a dyke?"
"I
am not gay, mother. Didn't you just hear me complaining about
Robert?"
Grandmother
clicked her tongue disapprovingly. "Look, dear, let me set it
straight for you. Stop paying attention to what those devilish little
cry-babies are saying. Women don't have it so bad at all. Not bad at
all. We've had a simple formula that has worked for countless
centuries, and I don't see why some of us are trying to rock the
boat."
"Mother,
you're not making sense."
"Of
course I'm making sense! And don't speak to me that way. I'm still
your mother. Now listen here. You have breasts, intelligence, and
wealth. Use them wisely through the person of your husband. He'll
give you anything you want. In case you haven't noticed, he married
you for the first, values you for the second, and in return bestows
upon you the third. Robert doesn't beat you, does he?"
"No!"
"Well,
there you have it. And even if he did beat you, it's a small price to
pay. A good beating maintains the illusion in the mind of the husband
that he is in command."
"Mother,
the whole idea is that we shouldn't have to depend upon anyone else."
"Rubbish!
The whole idea is to exact revenge. There's no point to it. It just
means you'll have to do more work to attain less than what you have
now. Have you ever heard of Messalina?"
"Mother,
she was killed!"
"Oh,
yes. Bad example. Well, what about all those Greek women then? You
read the histories and you'd think that it was just a society of men.
But I'm telling you, there were women behind these men, even if
nobody knows their names. And what difference does it make to them
now? They're dead!"
But
then I was at Patrick's door, and I managed to slip inside and close
the thing without anybody hearing. Sunlight streamed into the room
between the drawn curtains like ribbons of brilliance, pouring
through and washing my brother's small body. He was laying on his bed
staring meekly at the ceiling and didn't seem to notice that I had
come in, so I crept quietly next to him - not to scare him, but
because the whole place was so tranquil and yet fraught with just a
hint of tension that I didn't want to tip the balance in the wrong
direction.
Patrick's
eyes shifted frightened to my own as I came to sit next to him. I
could see that he was trembling.
"Patrick,"
I whispered, "what's the matter?"
But
he just kept staring at me dully, disinterested, his chin jostling
neatly up and down.
"Patrick!"
I insisted. "Did Grandmother come in here last night?"
It
did not seem that he would ever find his voice or the strength to use
it. How true of youth, that illusions are so easily broken down and
it's difficult to tell where exactly to go from there. But he did
open his mouth and try to say something. "David," he
whispered. "Don't let her come back."
"What?"
One
of his small hands grabbed my arm. "David, please! Make her go
away. Tell her she can't come back."
Angrily
I pulled my arm from his innocent grip and backed away. A look of
fear must have slithered across my face. "No! You!"
"But
you're older, David. Two years older. That means you should do it.
Tell her to go away, David. Please tell her. Please tell her."
"She'll
kill me, Patrick. She will, I just know it." Now the indignance
to which elder brothers are privy had entered into my voice, and my
expression was sliding towards a leer. I approached him. "
'Please tell her, David.' " I was mimicking him, waving my hands
deprecatingly. " 'Please tell her!' ".
"David!"
Patrick started to cry. His face curled into a ball of tears.
"That's
right, cry baby, go ahead and get Grandmother to come up here. She
will, if she hears you. You just bet. 'Cause she wants to get you."
But Patrick only started crying harder. A bit of anxiety passed
through me then, and in the extremity of the moment I hit my little
brother lightly across the cheek. He only wailed louder. Glancing
towards the door, imagining Grandmother's tired footsteps on the
stairwell, I hissed, "Patrick, listen! She's coming! Shhh!"
And suddenly he stopped, his face red and worried and listening.
"David?"
he whispered cautiously.
"No,
it's okay. It was nothing."
"Are
you sure?"
"Yes,
I'm sure. She's not coming."
"How
do you know?"
I
bit my lip in frustration, was tempted to hit him again and tell him
to stop asking so many stupid questions. "Because I'm older. Now
shut up."
He
wasn't convinced but didn't press the issue. He craned his neck to
listen for himself, but the only thing there was to hear were the
soft and muffled voices rising from beyond the door.
"What
day is it today?" Patrick asked me after a moment.
"Sunday,
stupid."
"Let's
go to the train tracks." He was looking at me hopefully. Until
the day he died my little brother refered to his favorite playing
ground as "the train tracks".
My
first inclination was to decline and then make fun of him, maybe hit
him again, but then I realized that it was the perfect excuse to get
away from Grandmother. "Okay," I agreed.
"And
you should tell Grandmother to go home."
"No."
The word slipped out shamefully. My cheeks started to burn, and I
couldn't look at my brother.
"Why,
are you scared?" Patrick practically sneered the last word.
"No!"
But I still couldn't look at him.
"Scaredy
cat!" Patrick started chanting. "Scaredy cat! Nothing but a
scaredy cat!"
"Stop
it!" I hissed, suddenly very angry.
"David
likes doo doo!" he called at me again, and this time I threw
myself upon him and twisted his arm behind his back. "Ow! Ow!
David! Ow, please! Ow, ow! Stop it! David!"
"Say
you like Tabitha Merkle!" I told him, grinning evily over his
ear.
"No!
No! Not Tabitha Merkle! Oooooo!"
I
stretched his arm back a little more. "Say it, Patrick. Say you
like her or the arm comes off."
"I'll
cry for Grandmother!" he threatened suddenly, and for a moment I
loosened my grip. But then my better judgement got ahold of me, and I
knew he wasn't going to do any such thing. So I bent his arm back
even farther. "Okay, I like Tabitha Merkle! I like Tabitha
Merkle!"
"Louder,"
I commanded.
"I
like Tabitha Merkle!"
"Louder,
Patrick, or the arm comes off!"
"I
like Tabitha Merkle," he cried aloud, "now let me go!"
So I did, and he threw me off just as the door burst open. I fell to
the floor near the foot of the bed and Patrick simply let his mouth
drop. He appeared caught, even though he hadn't been doing anything
wrong.
Grandmother
and mother slid into the room, looking us over quite carefully. I
could see that mother was annoyed from the look on her painted face.
I could always tell because her upper lip would tremble. "What
is going on in here?" she demanded, shifting her heavy gaze from
me to my brother. "Somebody better answer me."
"It's
alright, Rachel," Grandmother unexpectedly purred, and I
couldn't help but feel the fear turning in my stomach. "Boys
will be boys." A decrepidly menacing smile smothered the
wrinkled features of her face as she reached out a long, thin hand
and pinched the flesh on my cheek where the night before she had
struck me.
"David,"
mother said to me then, "the bed in the guest room is no good
for Grandmother's back, so I've decided that she's going to sleep in
your bed from now on."
At
those words, I threw a horrified glance toward Grandmother. She was
still smiling at me, and I remember feeling sick. "Does that
mean I have to sleep in the guest room?" I asked meekly, already
progressing through the first stages of sulking. My hands grappled
with each other limply in my lap, and my eyes found their way to the
floor.
There
was a steady silence before mother made a decision. "No. You'll
sleep in the basement."
"The
basement?" I cried, looking up at her. "But it's scary down
there."
"Well,
you'll have to deal with it."
Grandmother
leered over me with her spit smile and said, "We don't want your
poor Grandmother to aggravate her back, now do we?" Of course, I
had no idea what "aggravate" meant, but if it was something
that could incapacitate her then it must have been a wonderful thing.
And
then, much to my dismay, she crouched by my side, stinking like a
drying corpse, and passed me another, tighter pinch on that red flesh
written onto the left side of my face as if it were a monument, a
marker of rich territory that had been easily conquered.
On
the way to the subway tracks that morning, Patrick was unduly silent.
I tried several times to goad him into some form of conversation, but
he continually shrugged them off. Eventually, I gave up, and turned
my attention to the grim faces crawling about the streets, virtually
hovering over the melting pavement. The many faces of the city were
cold and grim and tall to my small and childlike perception, like
towers, and it was always with something akin to wonder that I looked
upon them. The tension strung tautly throughout the air was visible
to me in those days, like electric cross wires sifting through the
space between our brains. Perhaps all beasts of humanity are doomed
to some flavor of the same darkness that I was coming to know.
"Hey,
kid, gotta quarter?" a vagrant slurred as we passed him on our
way, slouched precariously in the gutter, somehow recently shaven.
But he was a shadow, like all the others that flit in and out of our
lives from one moment to the next, and was gone.
Patrick's
arms swung at his sides gracefully as his fortune-telling eyes
remained fixed ahead of him towards Jerome Avenue and the impending
tracks. The awesome cries of the city in its throes remonstrated all
around us, swallowed us as if we hadn't ever been. I never saw
anything wrong with wandering the streets of New York alone with my
brother. It wasn't the strangers I was worried about. It was the
family, and also the slow realization that in this Christian world,
father is always right.
I
think that people have an easy picture drummed into their heads from
such a little age about the way things are supposed to be, and for
them, even when they are not, that is how things are. It leads
parents to lie to their children, and then the children to resent
their parents because they have been lied to. So what kind of mother
was mother? A very bad one, perhaps, one that lied to her children
persistently, but I was permitted a few freedoms for which I am very
thankful, looking back now. Patrick and I may have only been six and
eight years of age when Grandmother first came to visit us, but we
had been forced to grow up faster than most, and we knew it.
As
we continued through the streets of the city I grew uneasy. It was
Grandmother, of course, and that eerie feeling I associated with her.
I couldn't get the picture out of my mind of the way she had slurped
her oatmeal that morning at the breakfast table, the way her lips
sagged behind the silver spoon and the little bit that dribbled down
her chin. There seemed to be so much loose flesh on Grandmother's
brittle bones that it seemed possible to just pull it all off, to
tear it from her in healthy scraps until it revealed the true nature
of the being inside. Her skin seemed to be just hanging like thick,
damp cloth over a hangar, with the consistency of puddy. And those
beady eyes, staring at me over the spoon while mother talked from the
kitchen of politics and the synagogue and whatnot.
"David,"
Patrick said to me after some time, "we've got to do something
about Grandmother." How many times did he ever say that to me?
"Did
you see her at breakfast?" I asked him.
Patrick
simply nodded and turned his head towards the sky tracks. They were
visible over the buildings not many blocks ahead. So the matter of
how we would handle Grandmother had been dropped, and not for the
first time, either. But the belief that somehow it would be resolved
never left my mind, especially after Patrick had gone away. It was
only in the end that I ever realized just how cruel that monster
really was. And to think that she contributed a quarter of my genes.
No wonder I have been prone to instability and brief bouts of summer
madness. Amen.
There
was a bum who spent a lot of time on the corner of White Plains and
Jerome of whom Patrick and I were very fond. He was quite a simple
man in mind, which is perhaps why he was so friendly. He ate and
drank off the kindness of the people that emerged from the
delicatessens. His name was Hank and his skin was dark, and it was
primarily because of him that my understanding of the black people
was not reduced to what was shown on the television and the movie
theater and what was whispered behind people's backs. If only someone
had realized what it would lead to. Senseless, that for years
Americans once believed that their gravest enemy lay sprawled between
the Pacific Ocean and the Ural mountains. It does not encourage me to
think well of the human race, or at least of the Europeans and their
decendants worldwide, to know that we had so many of the right ideas,
all that talk about the natural rights of men, and yet we so
completely bungled the whole thing up that the civilization became
entirely worthless, and now we're left wearily standing by the
rubble, our crosses humbled chunks of useless timber with flecks of
paint, facing each other and the tremendous task of starting over,
with the same ideas and, hopefully, all of the wisdom we might have
picked up in the last, fifty thousand years or so. Republics were not
instituted to protect the rights of men. Of course not. No, they were
instituted to protect the rights of wealthy men and their property.
Money. It's a fucking disease and we all want it, the worst and the
longest lasting epidemic humanity has ever known in any part of the
world, including monotheism. How is it that we've allowed ourselves
to find more beauty in Disney and Anheuser-Busch than in each other?
Why
is it that we've been brainwashed to believe that life has to be
tragic and then we die?
We
as a people have commited the gravest sin against humanity in that we
have rolled over on our backs with our feet and hands up in the air
so every politician and Chief Executive Officer can come along and
fuck us up the ass. Only the more wealthy have freedom. The rest are
indentured servants. It is inhuman that for some of us the value of
each man is simply the sum of his work potential over time, and how
much it will cost us to realize it. I still see an army of corporate
expenditures walking down the street beside me each day.
How
does newness come into the world? Salman Rushdie has asked us. Not
always by blood, although most ideas can be weighed in millions of
gallons of the fluid. But it is not enough simply to acknowledge that
something is wrong. It is our responsibility to determine what
exactly it is, even if the source is something we hold dear to
ourselves, like religion, or money, or the way we raise our children.
It is not Government, it is not corruption. It is, rather, ourselves,
the way we behave in large numbers. Rome taught us that much. What
happens when the great society stops producing great leaders, when it
stagnates? Things have to get stirred up, and at one point in our
history very recently they did, although I will not live to see the
outcome. And to tell the truth, I don't think our great-grandchildren
will either. Another Dark Ages? Perhaps, although my hope is that the
rebuilding many centuries from now is the last and that this time,
maybe, the dream of Pala will become real.
Hank
Williams was his name. He was a strange sort of man with a straight
face and glancing eyes. Such black eyes those were! They seemed to be
just sucking the light out of his face, set there below his high
forehead and the mottled nose sticking out the middle. Hank never
looked at anything for very long, though. Those eyes were constantly
roving, traveling the landscape as if there were always something new
to see. But how could there be? Hank spent most of his life standing
on the intersection.
"Pheeble,"
Hank told me once. "I mean, people." He smiled then. "There
are so m - many of them." Hank spent his life watching them run
past. While he leaned contentedly against the hard fronts of the
delicatessens sucking on his Jim Beam from a paper bag, he watched
them all go, day after day. Sometimes we would stand under the lazy
sign for Jerry's Kosher Deli, or against the lampost across the
street, or even against the support rails that held the tracks up.
Many things change, but not Hank. I imagine he remained there in that
intersection until the day he died, watching the people go by with
the same lacksidasical smile simmering in his brow and a nearly empty
bottle of whiskey in his hand.
"There
is a - you know - a - a - goddamn it! balance! Yes, there is a
balance, Davey. A balance that exists no pr - plats - place else in
the City."
Hank
was a happy man, no doubt about that. A bit simple in the brain,
perhaps, but I'd rather be stupid than unhappy. I used to think for
some time that you had to be stupid to be happy, because if you were
smart enough you couldn't possibly like what was going on around you.
But I don't think so anymore. Now I know that stupidity and ignorance
are two entirely separate things.
"I
wasn't always such a fool, you know," he told me a few years
after Patrick died. "I used to be able to sl - slr't -" He
stopped and grimaced. One of his eyes passed briefly over my face and
then found something else of interest. "Talk." He smiled
then, and his eyes played another dance across my face.
"Really?"
I answered him. "How'd you get that way?"
Hank
took another swig of whiskey and thought a moment before actually
attempting to speak. The stained and faded flanel shirt he wore was
the same one I had seen every spring and fall since I had first known
him. He had another, heavier set of shirts for winter that he kept
hidden. In the summer, he didn't wear a shirt unless someone gave him
one, and within a matter of hours he would invariably have lost it.
"I had a girlfriend once." Hank's smile appeared for a
moment. His eyes in their continuous trek about the intersection were
moving at a constant speed, so I knew he wasn't really seeing
anything except what once was. "I used to live in M - Mar -
Manhartten." Anothing grimace then. His lips parted slightly, as
if he wanted to correct himself, but sometimes it was just too
tiring. The helplessness he wore like a collar around his neck. "She
was boit - bert - you know." He made a vague gesture towards my
face. "Pretty. I loved her very much, but I had a vr - a vrib -
I had trouble with my - with my - you know, my -" He bit the
bottom of his lip in frustration, and the way his eyes were
protruding from his head I thought he might explode.
"C'mon,
Hank," I told him steadily, looking him in the wandering eyes.
"You can do it. What's the first letter?"
Hank's
mouth opened uselessly, and a sudden sadness overcame his face. There
were tears in his eyes, tears of sorrow but most of all frustration.
"Anger," he finally managed. "Out of control."
"You,
Hank? A temper?"
"Yes,
yes!" he suddenly exclaimed, and his roving eyes managed to hold
my image for a few seconds. "I had a temper!" He smiled
warmly at me then, as if grateful, but all I could feel was sadness.
I still thought he was stupid, too, although now I wonder. That man
knew everything that was going on around him.
"Did
you hit her?" I suddenly asked him.
Hank
nodded and raised the bottle of Beam to his lips. He swallowed it as
if it were apple juice. "Lost the big fr - r - fight, man. Got
my ass kicked, is what happled. The ol' lady didn't even c - c - come
to w - wartch." He shook his head again. "Man, if only I
had won. Big purse. But no." He shrugged and took another swig
of Beam. "Got drunk. Came home. She was p - pissed. I was
pissed." He shrugged again.
"Did
she hit you back?"
And
then Hank did laugh. Short, wheezing gasps of mirth pressed
precariously passed his lips. He shook his head. "No, no. She
was small." He laughed a bit more, but it was a hollow sound.
"She - she would have liked to, I think." He drank a bit
more out of the paper bag. "Hospital," he ejaculated,
biting a lip. Then, pointing to his right side of his head, he said
meekly, "The police," and dropped his eyes. I could see
them painfully searching the pavement below him.
I
have always wondered at the capacity for violence in the human beast.
Hank surprised me when he told me that he had once sent his
girlfriend to the hospital, because I couldn't picture him doing it.
And then the police, arresting him and taking him into a secluded
room in the station with metal walls so they could tie him up in a
chair and beat him, laugh at him, spit on him and chant "nigger"
in his face and beat him some more. The shock must have shown on my
face, because when Hank looked up and saw me he said, "I am a -
h - hidu - horru ... I am an ugly monster."
"No,"
I said then, and put a hand on his forearm. His face hung limply by
his shoulder, lips puckered and eyes bleeding all the emotion that
remained pent up inside, because there was no way for him to vent it
anymore. "No, Hank. It's the only way you know, isn't it? Hank,
look at me. Look at me, Hank!" And he did. His eyes twitched
uncontrollably, but somehow he kept them hitched to my face. "
You've been beaten, too, huh?"
Hank
just stared at me.
"And
sometimes you get so angry -"
And
then Hank started to cry. The tears welled up and came rushing from
the corners of his eyes, as if they were not symbols, dripped down
his face and across his chin and onto the pavement unheeded. He stood
there for a moment, his features crunched in a sorrowful agony, his
bottle in one hand and the other mocking his face, slapping it,
before he practically fell into my arms. My first reaction was to
push him away, but I was able to control the instinct and let him
weep on my shoulder despite the smell. There the two of us stood,
before the massless and cold spirits that aimlessly tread the mystic
streets of the city, I with glazed shock in my widened eyes and he
spilling tears like wine on my shirt. I could feel the trembling lips
and the way he clutched at my back with such ferocity that I was
afraid he was going to tear my thin body apart. But I remained still
and adamant for him, patting the back of his shirt in a meager
attempt at reassurance. Then the tears were gone, and he suddenly
pushed himself away, looked at me intently in the face as if staring
at something he had not known before, as if he were about to strike
me. And without even so much as a word he fled, ran down White Plains
grimly clutching his bottle of Beam and out of sight. I did not see
Hank again for some time. And when I did we never talked about what
happened that day, because certain things among men are better left
unsaid.
"What's
up, Hank?" Patrick called as we entered into the intersection of
White Plains and Jerome. Our old friend was standing against one of
the support rails Patrick found easy enough to climb. He was turned
away from us, calmly watching the traffic go by.
"Hello!"
he returned gaily when he saw it was us. "Going for a climb?"
"You
bet! Do you have a grandmother, Hank?"
"Well,
well," Hank replied, a near smile suddenly apparent in the
corners of his mouth. "I guess I did. Never knew her, though."
"You're
lucky," Patrick told him. "Our is a bitch."
"Patrick!"
Hank chided gently, feigning surprise. He took a needful swig on his
bottle. "Such a nasty ab - hub - hubbit."
"Habbit,"
I reminded him.
"Habbit,"
Hank repeated with another crooked smile.
Patrick
was always much quicker than I at ascending the support rails. There
were plenty of footholds for children such as us, but his feet and
hands were more nimble than my own and he always reached the top long
before I did. When I caught up with him he was already sitting
comfortably on the small service platform. There was hardly enough
room on the thing for the both of us when the subway passed.
"What
takes you so long?" he growled at me as I swung myself onto the
platform.
"I
hurt my foot this morning," I lied, taking a seat next to him.
"Sure
you did."
"Shut
up, Patrick."
The
view from up there was not much different from that down below. The
nearer buildings were transcended only to find that there was a whole
new layer of taller buildings, so we were still trapped in our own
little block, even if it was one a little bigger than on the streets
below. It's always difficult to be the highest one in New York City.
The day was pleasantly warm with only the slightest hint of fall in
the air, and the sun above us was smiling down through the haze of
pollution that cloaked us in our vast city.
"I
hate Grandmother," Patrick said after a moment. He got up and
climbed onto the tracks themselves. Somehow, the litter of the
streets found its way up here, too. Plastic bags and condom wrappers
and McDonald's pariphenalia were strewn across the electric rails and
the sign that warned, "Danger! High voltage." Patrick and I
were always careful not to touch the slick metal tracks themselves.
"Me,
too," I said. The haunting image of Grandmother eating her
breakfast still daunted me.
"I
think we should kill her," Patrick continued coldly, kicking at
an empty soda can.
"Right,
Patrick," I responded sarcastically. "Let's kill her."
"She
deserves it," my brother continued, looking at me seriously.
"And we could do it, too. No one would ever know it was us."
That
was when I realized that Patrick was serious. "Are you crazy?"
I spat at him, suddenly standing up. "Kill her? How?"
Patrick
smiled and started to wander aimlessly about the tracks, kneading his
way in and out of the great metal lines that somehow induced the
subway car on its incessant journey back and forth through the city.
"I spent all last night thinking about it. We could tie her up
here and let the train run her over." A perverse smile spread
across his face.
"Right,
Patrick," I said, sitting back down and turning my eyes towards
the street below. Hank was standing in the middle of the street
looking up and waving, but before I could answer the light changed
and a grey Mercedes was heading straight for him. He never noticed, I
guess, and the car came to a screeching halt a few feet from his
body. Behind the Mercedes were more cars, and inside them packed like
sardines in a can there were needlessly stressed human beasts,
worrying about all the places they had to get to, and in such a
hurry. The nasty tin can started emitting a sonorious honking, and
Hank started. I smiled, forced a chuckle, but somewhere inside of me
I shuddered. "We'll kill her."
"Right."
The nearness of the voice startled me, and when I looked I saw that
Patrick was standing just off the platform on the tracks, peering at
me with bright, young eyes. It was then that I felt the eager
trembling in the ribs of the structure.
"Train!"
I squawked habitually, for it was a game of ours to shout the warning
first. But Patrick didn't seem to have heard, nor felt the vibrations
in the tracks that were steadily gaining in strength.
"We'll
get her up here tonight, David, and tie her up to the tracks."
There was a dull, piercing look in his eyes, a look I had never seen
before. He must have stayed up the entire night trying to manage his
rage, and sometime before dawn the idea must have struck him. He had
always been the more reactionary of the two of us.
"Patrick,"
I told him calmly, not really listening to what he was saying, "get
off the tracks. There's a train coming."
"It's
not a train, stupid," Patrick snapped, and in that moment, the
subway car turned a corner to our left and was bearing down upon my
brother with a terrible determination. The whole set of tracks was
thrashing violently.
"Patrick!"
I shouted over the load careening that overcame us, and suddenly
there was some wind, and my hair was blowing across my face, and all
I could think of was that I didn't want to be left alone to kill
Grandmother by myself. Flailing with my arms, one to try and get the
hair out of my face and the other to get some hold on Patrick, I felt
the presence of the car like a mammoth that could not be supported on
these flimsy tracks, like a monster or a dragon that had sighted its
prey and would, if necessary, leap from the tracks in an attempt to
follow. But the hair slipped through my fingers and the other hand
touched only empty air, and suddenly there was the deep thud of
something landing next to me, and all I could think in the noise that
fills the universe when the demon comes is that it was the body of my
younger brother and he was dead, and I would be blamed for it.
But
someone grabbed hold of my hand and pulled it back just as the subway
car started to pass. The sounds were tremendous, rhythmic, and
melodious, long beats and short beats, up and down. The wind reversed
direction and tossed the hair back over my head and I could see
again. Next to me, with a hand on my wrist, was Patrick, smiling in
the most disconcerting way, gloating at the fading trail of the
conductor's voice projected out the window, swallowed so suddenly by
the void and the maddening roar of the cars: "Fucking crazy
kids!"
"Your
arm was going to come off," he mouthed to me as the cars kept
passing. But I was so suddenly furious that I pulled my arm from his
and swung my legs over the side of the rail. That was a mistake, of
course, because the tracks were still shaking, and so I just remained
cocked over the side clutching the railing in anticipated terror,
waiting for the train to pass before I couldn't hold on any longer.
Patrick just sat there on the platform, his waist at eye level,
smiling at me maddeningly. After the train had passed and I had
resumed my descent, I called up to him, "I'm telling on you. To
Grandmother!" My feet were slipping from their footholds in my
haste to reach the ground, were just itching to embank on the jog
towards home and Grandmother's imminent punishement.
Patrick
stood over me looking down and did not say a word.
This site and all its
contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one
Adam Wasserman.
All rights reserved.