Anatomy of Fear

12

I went back home, got a beer out of the fridge, opened my pad onto my work table, and looked at what I’d done. It wasn’t much yet. Nothing I could show Russo, and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

It got me thinking about my last girlfriend, the one who told me she didn’t know me any better after six months of dating than she did after our first, and said good-bye.

I looked around my spare apartment, at the furniture I’d inherited and never improved upon, the once white walls that had yellowed. I usually liked the fact that other than the superintendent I was the only resident in a building filled with small factories and offices, but right now it just felt lonely. Five years ago I’d taken over the lease from a painter with artist-in-residence status, which meant the city allowed you to live in a place other human beings thought uninhabitable.

Any minute I was going to start feeling sorry for myself, so I went back to the sketch I’d made of the man in the coat, and added a little more tone.

But the face was still blank, and nothing was coming to me.

I got another beer, set my iPod into its docking station, and listened to some music-Marianne Faithful, Lucinda Williams, and Tim Hardin, a singer I’d recently discovered who had OD’d in the seventies-real suicide material.

I looked back at my sketch, but another image snaked its way into my psyche.

I knew what it was-a variation on an image that had been in my mind for years.

I finished the beer, switched my iPod to an upbeat playlist of Reggaeton, Spanish rap over Jamaican dance hall with a little salsa thrown in, Daddy Yankee rapping “A ella le Gusta la Gasolina”-she loves gasoline-a double entendre if ever there was one, but the music didn’t work to distract me. My father was in my head, and I knew he was not going to quit anytime soon.

My father: who had been Superman, Batman, and every other Marvel and DC superhero to me. I thought about the good times-my father teaching me how to swing a bat and rhapsodizing about his hero, Roberto Clemente, the first Puerto Rican major league ballplayer; night games at Yankee Stadium and Shea, trips to the Planetarium. He’d initiated my love of music and he took me to a hundred movies, and when my tough-hombre dad cried during The Incredible Journey-a cornball movie about a lost dog and cat that I will never forget-I knew it was okay for me to cry too.

I pictured him when I was a little kid and he’d worn the uniform, standard blue, and then, when I was twelve, how he’d exchanged it for the narc’s costume of jeans and heavy bling.

Bits and pieces of those years started playing in my head: skipping school, taking the subway uptown to meet Julio in the middle of the day, smoking pot and snorting coke in alleyways and abandoned buildings, and there I was, back to the night my father found the drugs.

After he stormed out of the apartment I went to meet Julio, both of us edgy and eager to get stoned. El Barrio was stifling that night, everyone out on the streets, old men on milk crates playing dominoes; hydrants open, kids playing in the water; boom boxes blasting salsa music, men and women dancing. It was beautiful, the grit and garbage of the slum veiled by the darkness, moonlight painting the sweat on the dancers’ skin and the sprays of water silver.

Julio and I wandered the streets, sharing a few joints and a bottle of rum. We ended up in a movie theater and stared at the screen, but all I could see was my father’s face, and him yelling at me. Sometime around 3:00 A.M., I sobered up enough to realize I was going to have to face him. I begged Julio to come home with me as a buffer, but he wouldn’t do it.

That night was washing over me like a wave that knocks you down and drags you under. I drank another beer and turned the music way up, a raunchy number by some Puerto Rican duo, lots of drums and percussion. I managed to exchange the memory for the case, and worried I might not be up to it, that I hadn’t worked a homicide before.

Then I realized I had worked hundreds of homicides, just differently. I went to the closet and pushed stuff around till I found it, the Smith & Wesson NYPD-issued.38 Special heavy-barrel revolver. I hadn’t touched it since I left active police work, though I had kept up the permit. I got my hand around the stainless-steel grip. It felt good, but I remembered why I’d exchanged it for a pencil.

I went back to my work table and started a new drawing.

I had no idea why or where this was coming from, but stayed with it.

When I looked at it I shuddered. What the hell was this?

Maybe I was a little drunk.

But the drawing made me feel sober.

I thought about my father again, how he had always encouraged my art. He’d take my best drawings to the station and tape them inside his locker. He was proud of me, of my talent. The night he’d found my drugs, he had not only berated me but reminded me that I was special, that I’d been given a gift, and one day, he prayed, I would stop wasting my life and put it to use.

I wished he were here so I could tell him I had done what he asked. But sometimes you don’t get a second chance.