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 we, 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.