A Cool Breeze on the Underground

27

“How did you find me?” Neal asked Graham. Neal was nineteen then, and disgusted. Graham had given him the simple assignment to get lost. In a city of some 13 million people, Graham had found him- in two days.

Graham smiled his filthy smile and looked around the small third-floor apartment on Waverly Place. “Easy. I told you to get lost, and you didn’t. So you got found.”

Neal wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit. Spring break was too short and he had a paper on the Romantic poets to write. He had seen this stupid training exercise as an opportunity to get some work done. “Are you going to be cryptic, or are you going to tell me?” he asked.

“What’s ‘cryptic’? Does it mean smart? Smarter than a stupid nineteen-year-old who picks a classmate’s apartment to get lost in? Are you going to get me a coffee or anything?”

“I’ll have to grind some.”

“Oh, yeah, this is the Village, I forgot.” He pointed to his crotch. “Grind this. Just make some coffee. You know, if you were the Fugitive, that series would have been over after the first episode. You’re easier to find than rice on Mott Street.”

Neal took some expensive mocha blend out of the refrigerator. He had bought it specially to help him work on the paper. The coffee shop around the corner was his favorite in the city.

“Are you going to lecture me, or just sit there?” he asked Graham. There were days, many of them, when he hated Graham.

“I’m going to lecture you. I’m just dragging it out because I’m enjoying it so much.

“You see, Neal, when you want to get lost, the first thing you got to lose is yourself. You got to become a different person, otherwise you bring all your habits, and likes and dislikes, and all your connections with you. Anybody who knows you has a good shot at finding you. And I know you, son.”

“Yes, you do, Dad.”

“I know you got this spring vacation. I even know you got a thing to write. I know you want peace and quiet.

“I also know you’re too cheap to rent a hotel room, even though Friends would have picked up the bill, and I know you haven’t got your driver’s license, so you didn’t drive out into the country, where you probably should, have gone.”

Neal carefully poured the ground coffee into the filter and measured out the water in the carafe.

“I hate the country.”

“So where is Neal going to find a place? From a classmate who lives off campus but is going away on a nice little student vacation. So your Dad gives you this assignment and then does some asking around. Now I know Neal isn’t going out to Queens or Brooklyn, because he wants to enjoy himself. And I know he’s not staying on the Upper West Side, because he doesn’t want to bump into his Dad on the street, but he also doesn’t have the discipline to stay inside and really hide like he should. And I know he’s not going to the East Side, because it’s all rich people and he’s prejudiced against them. And I remember how many times Neal has told me that if he ever left the West Side, he would move to the Village. So it became a simple matter of elimination and a little legwork. How many of Neal’s classmates live in the Village and are going to Florida for spring break?”

“One.” Neal was disgusted.

“I only waited the two days so you could get some work done on your paper so you don’t flunk out and embarrass me.”

Neal looked at him with true awe. “That’s amazing. That really is. That’s like Sherlock Holmes!”

“Right. Also you wrote down the address on your phone pad.”

“You broke into my apartment?”

“I have a key.”

Neal was confused. “Yeah, but I took the note with me. I remember ripping it off the pad and putting it in my pocket!”

“Are we going to drink the coffee or admire its delicate aroma?”

“It’s not done yet, and tell me.”

“You tell me.”

Neal thought for a minute, then he knew. He was so goddamned angry at himself, he wanted to scream. “I wrote the note with a ballpoint pen and it left an impression on the next page.”

“That’s right. You’re an idiot.”

“I am.”

“But you’re a live idiot.” Graham stood up, walked over to Neal, and took him by the collar with his one real hand. “Listen, son, anytime you have to disappear, it’s serious. You disappear because you have to. Now your fuckup with the notepad made it easy, but I would have found you anyway, for all the reasons I told you. When you disappear, you don’t leave anything behind except yourself. You become somebody else. Or you’ll get found. And the next time you get found, it might not be me, but someone who wants to kill you. You got that, son?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Graham let go of him. “Good. Now get lost. I’ll drink the coffee.”

Neal walked down the stairs and onto the street. Two days later, he was unhappily ensconced in a sleeping bag in a state park in Rhode Island. He hated every minute of it.

Graham didn’t find him, however.