Box Nine

Chapter Twenty-Six

There’s a logic that says that the last thing a mailman would want to do in his off hours is walk. But like everything else, this is not always the case. Ike enjoys walking on the good days. On the bad days, he needs it like food and shelter, a condition of survival. But today has gone beyond the definition of a “bad day.” Today has become something that just a week ago his imagination couldn’t conceive of. Today is a living horror story, a nightmare all the more sickening in its clarity, in its total sensual capacity. Today is like the vision of hell that every black-habited nun warned him about in his innocent childhood. Terrors your small brain cannot even picture, Mr. Thomas, terrors that are never-ending, eternal and absolute, pain and revulsion and sorrows beyond anything anyone who ever walked this sinful planet could ever concoct.

The one thing the nuns were wrong about, the one thing Ike would actually find amusing at any other time in his life, is their idea that most of this terror and horror and sorrow was caused directly by carnal thought and deed. And this just isn’t the case. The sex came after the horror, Ike thinks. The sex came later. It didn’t cause anything. It was caused. By, he doesn’t know, confusion and desperation and plain fright.

Afterward, neither he nor Eva knew what to do. She disappeared into the bathroom. He went to the window and peeked through the blinds and when he didn’t see Lenore’s car, for some reason he was relieved. When Eva came back into the room she was dressed. Ike sat in bed, silent. She leaned over to him, one knee up on the mattress, kissed his forehead, and said, her voice sounding like someone else, someone in a movie unsure of whether to cry or laugh, “I’ll call you when I know what I’m going to do.” Then she left and he was alone in the green duplex again.

And rather than be alone he decides to walk. He heads for downtown thinking he’ll hang around the mall, eat something fried at a kiosk, read magazines in the bookstore. But when he reaches the mall entrance, he goes past it and veers toward the Canal Zone.

When Ike was in college, the Canal Zone was just getting its start as a self-segregated neighborhood for the local art crowd. Back then it was just one more run-down industrial section in another northeastern town on the slide. Each small manufacturing operation that packed up and headed for the Sun Belt left the Zone with one more unused, century-old, red-brick mill. At the time, there was little call to turn the old factories into hip, upscale condos, and they sat empty until one by one, small art groups, each with a different axe to grind, began to move in and stake claims.

Now, a decade later, the Canal Zone is Quinsigamond’s own East Village. It’s got half a dozen theater groups, performance-art clubs, countless galleries and boutiques and gritty little cafés. There are political-fringe headquarters and all kinds of subterranean co-ops and communes. There are constantly weird, ragtag parades being run through the streets, bizarre posters being slapped up on stop signs and mailboxes in the middle of the night. There’s a lively, if not yet hard-core, drug trade. And on every corner there’s at least one character who, in another, older time, might have been referred to as a hipster.

Ike passes them by like they were phone poles or parking meters. They’re all in mid-spiel about something, speaking in a throaty whisper, preaching a gospel of detached weirdness, a speedy-Zen commentary on the constant irony of this world. And as he passes, Ike wonders if he listened, would he hear a continuous story, a coherent patter carried from beacon to beacon, one mouth picking up the tale as the last one leaves off? Maybe they’re all part of some modern guild, a vocation filled with mentors and apprentices, fathers and sons, passing down, intact, the difficult art of hyperesoteric mumbling, idiosyncratic, stoned to the gills, living Burma Shave billboards, one-man Greek choruses, clad in last year’s suit and working in the new medium of insinuation and gesture.

They come in both sexes. They perpetually leer, like they’ve just heard a joke that Ike wouldn’t understand. Their hands move like first-base coaches, touching themselves on the arm, neck, behind, groin, forehead, mouth, lighting for barely a second and moving onto another body part. Their heads twitch in a countermeasure to the movement of their eyes. They all seem to have studied ventriloquism at one time in the foggy past. Their mouths don’t seem to move in relation to the volume of words that erupt into the air around their shoulders. They give Ike the creeps and he hurries down the street, eyes focused on the pavement, head hunched in toward his shoulders.

Between the growing cold and the Zone hipsters, he feels a need to get off the street for a while. Ahead, he sees a green and orange neon sign suspended out over the sidewalk. It reads “Bella C’s.” He does a quick shuffle toward the place, tries to look in the window, but it’s obscured by a handmade poster taped to the glass that shows a crude picture of a sailboat and what Ike guesses, from the stick-figure palm tree, is a desert island. Underneath the drawing are the words:

Bella C Presents

Tonight Only

“Shake-It-Up in the Zone”

A Jolly Rotten Players Production of

The Big Storm Story

tix inside/3 drnk min.

Before he can think, Ike pulls open the door and steps into the dark.

He stands in the doorway while his eyes begin to adjust. The bar has a big, open feeling to it, like there’s more to it than can be seen, a back section for banquets and private functions that runs on forever. The immediate barroom has a gutted feeling, like partitioning walls were once knocked down to make some more space for swelling crowds.

But there are no crowds here tonight. The room is empty except for a large old woman behind the bar, a thin cigar wedged just barely into her mouth. The curls of smoke obscure her face, but as Ike moves closer to take a stool, he can make out features. There’s a huge pinkish boil bubbling out on the left side of her jaw. Her hair is pulled tight and high on her head and pinned into a severe bun. She looks slightly simian, large-eyed, long-jawed. Her ears wing out from her head and stray wisps of dyed-orangey red hair shoot out among them like they were failed efforts at trying to wire the ears back to the skull. She’s dressed in what Ike’s mother would have called a housecoat. Looking closer, he sees it’s covered in this odd print of tiny tongues, something like the old Rolling Stones logo, but smaller, more common, less caricatured. Ike thinks her housecoat is one of those instances of someone reaching too far for a joke. The comic’s version of the law of diminishing returns.

The woman is intent on the crossword puzzle from today’s Spy. She hunches over the paper, removes the cigar from her mouth, inserts a stubby pencil, sideways like a horse’s bite. She’s kneading her forehead with her fingers as if the action will cause synonyms to form in her brain.

“I’ll have a beer,” Ike says, and his voice comes out too high.

The woman ignores him.

He waits a full minute and says, “Ma’am, a beer, please.”

She sighs, takes the pencil from her mouth, and says, “I can’t hear you,” in a standard, singsong, child’s tone.

Ike looks around the bar and back at the door. “Are you closed?” he asks. “The door was open and the sign was on, so I came in. Is that the story? You closed?”

“Can’t hear a word,” she says in the same maddening lilt.

“You’re asking me to leave,” Ike says. “You want me to go?”

“Levi’s,” she barks, the word sputtering out of her mouth. “L-E-V–I-S. Type of blue jean. Levi’s. That right? You’d say so?”

“Does it fit?” Ike asks.

She gives him a spastic little nod. Her mouth falls open and he sees what few teeth she has are caramel brown. She writes in the word, places the pencil behind an ear, and slides the paper under the bar. Then she grabs a mug from a back shelf and pulls Ike a beer.

“Can’t talk when I’m doing the puzzle,” she says. “Everyone knows they have to wait until I finish the puzzle.”

“Sounds fair,” Ike says, taking the mug and digging into his pocket for some bills. He lays them on the bar to indicate that she can run a tab, that he’ll be here a while, but she snaps up one of the bills and rings it into the ancient cash register at the end of the bar.

“I’m Bella,” she calls down to him. “The original.”

“Hello, Bella,” Ike says, trying for his friendliest voice. “I’m Ike.”

“I’ve never seen you in here before, Ike. I don’t know many of the names, but something about most of the regulars sticks out. A shaved head or half a shaved head. Or a tattoo. Everybody’s got a tattoo today, you ever notice that? They’ve made a real comeback. My husband had tattoos. He was a sailor. Most sailors get a tattoo, you know. That’s the business we should have gone into. Everyone wants to be marked up today.”

“I’m not a regular,” Ike says. “I’m not from this part of town. I’m just out walking.”

“Nobody walks anymore. There’s the difference. Everybody wants to get marked up, and nobody wants to walk anymore. They all sit and look at the tattoos.”

“I guess,” Ike says, and starts in on the beer. He’s starting to like the place. As weird as Bella is, he feels something maternal off her. Her place is starting to relax him. He wishes he had brought a mystery book and could settle in for a while.

“You come down here for the show?” Bella asks, walking back toward him as she mops the bartop with a rag. “It’s four bucks. And that’s on top of the three-drink minimum.”

“Yeah,” Ike says, “I saw the poster in the window. What’s the story on that?”

“The story,” Bella says, leaning in over the bar, pressing her chest down on her arms, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “is two bucks for Bella. Before we agreed, one of the little bastards says, ‘But you get to see the play for free.’ I almost spit in the little shit’s eye. Now they don’t let him do any of the talking. And they pay Bella her fifty percent gross.”

“This would be the theater company. The Jolly Rotten Players.”

“Is that an idiot name or what?”

“It’s got a ring. It’s got something.”

“A ring. Sheesh. I know what you expect. You expect me to be an understanding little old bitch under the skin, right? You expect me to say, ‘You know, Ike, under all the green hair and skull tattoos and leather and chains and drugs and sneering, they’re really good kids, just kids after all.’” She throws a hand out from her side like she was swatting away some invisible insect. “Well, that’s not Bella and that’s not them. They’re exactly the little shits they seem to be.”

Ike shrugs. “So why let them use your place?”

“Bella’s was here a long time before these little bastards were even born. You’re from the city, then you know business down here had some rough years. We were hand-to-mouth now and again. Then Archie has the heart attack and I’m all alone. I had license problems. I had break-ins. You’re too young to remember the riots down here.”

“I remember hearing—”

“Hearing’s nothing. This place was a goddamn war zone. Now it belongs to the artists, and all the trash has supposedly moved over to Bangkok Park.”

“Supposedly?”

“These wise guys with the earrings in the nose, in the cheek. Enormous pain in the ass, my friend. You’ll never know.”

“But they help you pay the rent.”

“Bingo. We play out this little lie. I pretend that they’re like my black sheep, my kids that went to Europe and came back all wrong, okay? They pretend like I’m the stone age mommy, all out of it, but a good heart and genuinely lovable. It’s all shit. We’re both … what’s the word? It was in Sunday’s puzzle. Like a heartworm … something inside of you—”

“Parasite,” Ike says.

Bella slaps the bar. “There you go. Parasite. Eight letters. Fits perfect. They get a cheap place to do their plays, read their books. I take what I can off of them. I never ask where they get the money. They manage.”

“You both get what you need.”

“Well, that’s about the best you’re going to do.”

“Amen. How about a shooter to go with the beer?”

“How about the four bucks for the performance?”

Ike pulls all the money he has out of his pocket, finds a twenty, and lays it on the bar.

Bella doles out a shot of the house bourbon and says,“Show should begin anytime now. Hope those aren’t your good clothes.”

Ike looks down at his legs hugging the legs of the barstool and then back up at Bella.

“The special effects. You could get soaked if they start to cut up. I was nuts with the bastards at dress rehearsal, but then I realized the floor’s cleaner than it’s been in years.”

Ike picks up the shooter and asks, “Where’s the rest of the audience?”

“Looks like it’s just you and me tonight, darling. But you’ll love it. Well worth the price. It’s a classic. Or so they tell me. I don’t remember ever seeing it and I was crazy for the movies when I was young. Raul, he’s the leader, the head guy, he says, ‘It’s restructured, Bella, reinvented.’ Reinvented. Like it was a machine. Jesus. These kids could talk the ear off a goddamn dead dog. So much horseshit.”

Ike fires the shooter, and a bell, like an old school recess bell, starts to ring from some back room.

“That’s it,” Bella says, and starts to shuffle out from behind the bar. She moves to the front door and locks it, then yanks the heavy, dark green pull shades down to the windowsills.

Ike rotates on the stool to follow her.

“What’s all that for?” he asks.

“Part of our agreement,” she says. “Once the bell rings, that’s it. No one else gets in. They say you got to be here from the start.”

She gets back behind the bar and her head starts to nod and she says, “Oh, and I’m supposed to pass this,” and she pulls out an old black felt top hat from under the bar and slides it down to Ike. There’s an index card secured in the hatband that reads: “Fund for the Preservation of Dangerous Art.”

He throws a dollar in, slides the hat back to Bella, and asks, “What’s so dangerous?”

She ignores him and sinks down into a small, rickety, wooden rocker wedged in behind the bar. The yellowish lights from the room’s chandelier begin to flash on and off. Garbled noise starts to sound from the same direction as the recess bell. It’s a few seconds before Ike can determine that the noise is supposed to be wind and thunder. It sounds like it’s being played off his mini-Panasonic. Then, sounding slightly closer, he hears two male voices yelling over the storm.

1ST VOICE: Son of a bitch, we’re going down!

2ND VOICE: Bogus shit, dude, death city!

1ST VOICE: Where’s the big Kahuna?

2ND VOICE: In a crouch, man. Behind you. And it’s the waves that’s the big Kahuna in a storm like this.

1ST VOICE: Bad shit, man, we’ll never surf again.

KAHUNA: I heard that, you little weasel. We pull through, I hope you get herpes.

The owners of the three voices start to appear from the double doorway at the back of the room. They’re three young men, maybe around twenty years old. They’re all dressed in those longish California swim trunks, “baggies” Ike guesses they’re called, all hot pinks and lime greens and Day-Glo tangerine. Though he can’t see too well from this distance, they seem to have perfect golden tans and Nautilus-pumped bodies straight out of a muscle-magazine ad. And all three are posed, arms out at their sides, shoulders hunched forward slightly, bodies crouched a bit, knees bent, one leg pivoted forward, the other set at a ninety-degree angle. They’re standing on surfboards. They’re pretending to surf.

The wind and thunder noise suddenly gets much louder and the chandelier increases its flashing.

KAHUNA: Hold on, buds, it’s the big one!

Stagehands dressed in black spandex burst through the door carrying red metal buckets with the word FIRE printed on them. They douse the surfers with water, then one lone stagehand bolts from the pack, runs straight toward Ike, and heaves his pail. It’s a perfect hit. The water is freezing and Ike jumps up off his stool and screams, “Jesus.”

He wipes his eyes clear to see Bella waving him to be quiet. She throws him a bar rag and indicates that he should sit back down. And he does, mopping his head with the musty-smelling towel.

The action in the depths of the bar continues as the trio of imperiled surfers are replaced by two new beachpeople. One, an older surfer, middle-aged even, his lean body given over to flab and slicked-back blond hair gone grey and white. A hefty beer gut hangs down low over his baggies. He’s got those plastic sandals on his feet, the ones that hook between your big and next-to-big toe.

With the old surfer is a young blonde, sixteen, seventeen years old, high school age. She’s dressed in an unbelievably skimpy pink bikini and she tosses her mane of hair around like it was a tangle of whips. Something about the scene is familiar to Ike and it starts to nag him before the actors even open their mouths.

GIRL: God, Daddy, can’t you do something about the rain?

HER FATHER: Miranda, baby, chill out.

When he hears the girl’s name, the whole thing becomes clear. He’s about to witness some reinvented Shakespeare. It’s The Tempest. He read it in high school. He saw most of it on PBS a few years back. The big storm. The fairy. The ugly witch’s son. The dispossessed duke. The bored young daughter. It’s The Tempest done as a Frankie Avalon — Annette Funicello beach party movie. Gidget Goes to Stratford-upon-Avon. Ike knows they think this is wildly original. He wonders if they’ve ever heard of Natalie Wood. He’s sitting in front of a surfer version of The Tempest. And the door to the place is locked.

He gives a soft knock on the bartop and Bella’s eyes open. He holds up another twenty and points to the bottle of bourbon on the bottom shelf. Bella rolls her eyes, then nods her head, and Ike hoists himself halfway over the bar and grabs the bottle. He pours himself another shooter and settles back down on the stool to watch.

The play is jumpy, more like a series of old-fashioned blackout skits than a continuous story. The dialogue is all slang, white-leisure-class-teentalk and surfer colloquialisms, monosyllabic, perpetually sarcastic, tinged with a weird falsetto drawl. And by the first act it’s almost unbearable. Each time Miranda gasps “Daddy!” in the exasperated, breathless, eye-bulging whine, Ike belts back a drink. He’s starting to feel plastered by the end of the second scene.

And because of this he starts to think that maybe he’s missing something, that possibly, as the play progresses, the actors get more chancy, start to go beyond simply translating Shakespeare’s English into West Coast beachyak. The pace of the production starts to seem unraveled to him. The action starts to somehow seem more serious and less farcical. And all of these changes seem to be revolving around the entrance of the actor playing Caliban.

Ike tries to pay more attention, but he feels he must be more drunk than he realizes. The dialogue starts to lose its logic, speed up a little, get louder. More than once, the actors stop in midsentence and stare at one another. Ike glances over to see Bella up out of her rocker and leaning on the bar, eyes squinted, giving full attention to the action. Ariel, the spirit, played fully naked by a well-developed adolescent girl, can be seen whispering something into Prospero’s ear.

The actor playing Caliban is a real muscleboy, probably about six four with a chest span twice the size of Ike’s. He’s dressed in a tattered loincloth and he’s got a blond head of long Sampson-curls that put Miranda’s locks to shame. His body is covered with white powder and he moves in a strange skittish but agile manner, sort of leaping about the stage with the hyper-surety of a chimpanzee and the risky grace of a veteran dancer. Ike can see his Adam’s apple doing a weird, overly rapid throb in the center of his neck. He’s playing off Prospero, and to Ike, the older actor seems clearly uncomfortable.

CALIBAN: You unrighteous fuck, I hope you get windburn like no amount of cocoa butter will help.

PROSPERO: You’re like the most strung-out meat I’ve ever tuned, dude. You should watch the tongue. I know some cheap change’d give you crabs that never leave.

CALIBAN: This was my beach, man. You cruise, hang a bad left on the pipe one Saturday and bang, you cruise in on my grains with the bimbette. I’m Mr. Right for the first go-around, def, “Hey, Callie, join the clambake, babe, hey, Callie, you’re the main guy.” But it’s all lie-city, man. I’m no Mr. Bonus, nooo, sir. You were a righteous fuck to Callie, teach me how to roll with the big curls, the right wax to lay on my board, okay? But now it’s just Calliethe-lifeguard, eyes on the water, don’t move your ass, and holler when the high tide breaks. I wish you’d drown in the barrel next time out, you shit!

PROSPERO: [angry, but fearful]: You dog! You mother! Me, who taught you the Prospero-roll, who taught you one-foot balance, who taught you surfer tongue—

CALIBAN: [outraged, screams]: You taught me the language, and the big score is that I know how to curse! The red plague eat your heart for teaching me the language!

Prospero’s mouth drops open to speak, but Caliban suddenly takes a swing and lands a full fist to his gut. Ike can see the big actor lose his wind and sink to his knees. There’s a shocked look on his face. Ariel lets out a yell. Miranda appears on the scene, looks down on Daddy, and grabs hold of Caliban’s steroid-expanded arm. He flails her away, letting out a bizarre barking noise, then grabs her around the throat and heaves her down on the floor next to Prospero.

“Jesus Christ,” Bella says, “this ain’t in the script.”

Surfers start to flood the stage area. Caliban starts into a yelling, spastic unrecognizable speech, while throwing fellow actors into walls and smashing random props and then regular bar chairs and tables. Ike sits frozen for a second. He hears Caliban yell words that sound familiar but have no meaning to him. Then the words end completely and there’s just an awful, high-pitched buzzing sound, as if a hive of crazed wasps were living in his mouth and throat.

Then the blood starts to flow. Caliban is taking full power swings at everyone, catching jaws and noses, cracking bone and tearing open flesh. He grabs Ariel and lifts her bodily into the air over his head, then pitches her against a wall. The sound of her impact stops everything, but for just a half a second, and then Caliban is on top of Prospero, pounding on his head, stomping on his kidneys.

“Do something,” Bella’s screaming, and it takes Ike a moment to know she means him. She wants him to act. To help. To subdue this insane son of a bitch in a loincloth.

Ike slides off the stool and watches as Caliban does a replay of the Ariel-heave with Prospero’s limp body. Then he notices Ike in the distance and his head begins to jerk and make horrible violent twitching motions. His eyes go into spasms of blinking and bulging and the whole time his mouth is moving too fast to really see, lips opening and closing in an awful, stomach-turning blur.

He starts to walk toward Ike in a jumpy stutter step. Ike begins to tremble, grabs the seat of his barstool, and pulls it up in front of him like some ill-prepared circus act. He thrusts out into the air several times and Caliban makes swatting motions with his hands, still too far away to grab a leg.

Ike tries to hold the stool steady. He yells, “I’ll smash it over your fucking head, asshole. Don’t do it.”

Caliban takes one more hopscotch step forward. Ike wheels, smashes the stool through the glass of the locked front door, and throws himself outside, tearing open his cheek and hand on shards that remained lodged in the frame. He falls onto the sidewalk and rolls, gets to his knees, then feet, and without looking starts a wild, panicked, screaming run away from Bella C’s.

After several blocks, he looks back over his shoulder, but there’s no sign of Caliban. He turns down an alleyway, jogs to the far side of a trash dumpster, falls to the ground, hidden from view of the street. He starts to suck on his bleeding hand, gags, falls sideways, and vomits. He begins to have spasms, his stomach emptying over and over until all that’s left to throw is acidic bile that burns all the way up to his mouth.

When the dry heaves finally begin to fade, he leans his back against the brick wall behind him and tries to reduce all his thoughts to a simple, logical plan of action, of movement. He needs to get home. He needs to get to Lenore. He needs to tell Lenore everything that’s happened. The box of mutilated fish. The Bach Room. The box of severed fingers. Caliban’s fit. Lenore will know what it all means. And what to do.

He reaches into his pockets but they’re empty. All of his money is on the bartop at Bella’s. He doesn’t even have a dime for a phone. So he’ll have to walk back out of the Canal Zone. He doesn’t want to move. He’d rather stay right here in the alley, like some kid who’s wandered off in a shopping mall, like some camper who went too far into the woods. Stay in one place and let the rescuers come to you, isn’t that the rule of thumb, the key to safety?

But, technically, he’s not lost. He knows his way back home. He’s an adult who’s lived in this city all his life. If he can just get started, he’ll be home in an hour. If he can just make the first move, pull himself up off the ground and walk out to the main street.

He stays seated. He begins to have muscle spasms in his arms and legs, annoying cramps of tightened muscle that start off as a ticklish throb, but once he’s conscious of them, increase to an awful, painful knot. He tries to massage the backs of his calves, tries to make his body calm down and let the muscles unclench. He runs his hands up his opposite arms from elbow to shoulder. The knots reduce back to the quivering, ticklish mode, but then lock there.

So he gets up and tries to walk the feeling off. He moves slowly to the end of the alley, pokes his head out, and looks from side to side, then steps onto the sidewalk and turns left toward the west side. He starts walking near the edge of the sidewalk, using the wall of parked cars, half of them burned-out hulks, as a shield. Each time a car comes down the street, he fixes his eyes on the pavement and quickens his step.

There’s an amalgam of dissonant background noise that perpetually changes. Mainly, it’s made up of music from the dozens of hole-in-the-wall clubs in the Zone. Weepy, overamplified guitar fades to neo-bebop alto sax, which is overtaken by slightly out-of-tune chamber music which mutates into a postmodern, electronic orchestra of unnatural, machinish sounds. It’s never clear exactly where any of the sounds are coming from. It always seems like it’s just one more block ahead, but by the time Ike reaches this position, the next noise has taken over and beckons from farther up the street.

And there are images to go with the sounds, glimpses of movement and light framed within the obsolete largeness of the tenement windows on the opposite side of the street. The windows belong to the second-floor apartments above the street-level storefronts and most of them are without shades or curtains. He can see picture after picture of people in the midst of an assortment of common activities — dancing, smoking, embracing, pacing, eating. Everyone he spots seems to be dressed in black, as if the entire neighborhood had agreed to mourn some terrible loss.

Ike thinks the windows are a lot like the succession of comic strip frames in the newspaper. Only this is a long strip that makes little or no sense. And that’s probably totally appropriate for the Zone. A living comic strip of the absurd. Live-action Nancy and Sluggo in the grip of post-punk existential boredom. Someone else, maybe even Lenore, might get a real kick out of the window-pictures. Ike just wants to get back home. He wants to find the most direct route back to the green duplex and lock himself inside. He wants to pull some 1930s mystery off the shelf and lose himself in the logic of its investigation. Or even better, he wants to be inside Lenore’s apartment. To eat waffles in her kitchen — he’ll do the cooking — while she checks the bolts on the doors and stands a confident watch with her Magnum.

He’ll tell it all to Lenore as soon as he gets home. He’ll run down the whole sequence of events and ask her what it might mean. He’ll leave the next step up to her, trust in her experience and general wisdom. It occurs to him now that what he’s casually taken to be faults in Lenore’s character — aggressiveness, suspiciousness, and, at times, full-blown paranoia — are really probably talents, tools for survival, the very attributes that could ensure longevity and, maybe, peace of mind.

On his right he passes an old Catholic church made of sandstone and stained glass. It’s long been abandoned by its parishioners, desanctified and sold by the diocese a good decade ago. Ike was inside once for some forgotten relative’s baptism. He was only a kid, eight or nine years old, and all he can remember is the infant’s screaming at the water and balm.

Now the place is a nightclub of some sort. It’s retained part of its original name — St. Anthony’s — but the new owners have added, in orange neon under the original sign, “Temptation.” There’s a bouncer standing before the heavy wooden double doors, a big black guy in leather pants and wristbands, but wearing a priest’s shirt and white collar. It must be the uniform, Ike guesses. He wonders how the waitresses dress. The bouncer stares down at him as he passes, the whole time running a finger around the white collar like it was choking him. His tongue comes out of his mouth and stretches up toward his nose, then dips back inside and does a run around his gums, making the mouth and cheeks balloon out. A clicking noise starts to come from him and Ike turns his walk into a jog and hurries past the church club.

He runs a right onto Verlin Ave and slows back to a fast walk. In a doorway across the street, he spots a man and a woman, obviously deaf, speaking with their hands. They’re lit by a yellow bulb in a wire-mesh cage mounted above the building’s entrance. Ike makes himself watch as, simultaneously, their hands speed up, practically convulse, fingers flying, opening and closing and making forms too fast to be perceived. They’re jabbing their hands so close to one another’s faces, it seems someone will lose an eye. Ike begins to run again.

Within a block he comes upon two women, both dressed in white leotards, dancers he’s sure, brawling in the middle of the street, rolling over and over, clawing and choking each other, slapping wildly, biting, butting heads. Their bodies are covered with dirt and oil from the street. And the sound of an insect swarm seems to engulf them.

He reverses direction, cuts through an alleyway, emerges onto Congo to see two teenage boys facing off on a second-story fire escape. They’re stripped to the waist and sweat on their chests actually glimmers in the glow of the streetlight. They’re both holding baseball bats, waving them in narrowing circles directly above their heads, mouths open, hollow, taut — the wasp sound gushing forth, echoing off the walls of the brick five-family tenement opposite them.

Ike’s in a panic now. He starts to run through backyards, across driveways and parking lots, turning every time he comes to a corner. He sees a pack of dogs, shepherds, leaping up and over cars parked in a club’s lot. They let out a sickening, altered howl, lower and louder than is natural, staticky, painful-sounding, like their bodies were forcing out a noise that would eventually rupture their throats.

Everywhere Ike looks he sees people in a state of noncontrol. Every window he views in the distance shows someone’s head and body in a jerking, spastic dance. And everywhere, hovering above him, is the noise. The buzzing. The clicking. The air is choked with it.

Finally, he crosses the border out of the Canal Zone, and after a time, he begins to notice the noise has stopped. On the way back home, the streets are fairly empty. There’s an occasional person out walking a pet, but they act normal enough, silent but for clearing throats or sniffling noses.

He’s still managing a wheezy jog when he comes to the green duplex. The Barracuda is parked out front and he wants to run to it, fall on his knees, and kiss the hood. There are no lights on in Lenore’s apartment. He’ll have to wake her. She’ll yell at first, but he’ll make her understand in no time. He’ll be as rational and controlled as possible, simply present her with the facts and request assistance. Instruction. Protection.

He digs a key chain out of his back pocket as he comes up the walkway. His lungs are seizing up in his chest, and he feels a knifing pain with each throb. He climbs the stairs and fumbles with the keys in the darkness. There are only two on the ring, his and Lenore’s. He lets himself into her apartment, slides his feet along the carpet, maneuvers through the living room without banging into any furniture. He moves down the hall toward the bedroom. As he walks, he debates whether to start calling out his presence, alerting her that it’s only her brother, that there’s no danger, no need to go for the gun.

But he keeps quiet. He’ll wake her with a gentle touch to the shoulder, his voice low and calm. It’s safer that way.

The door to the bedroom is slightly ajar. There are shadows from the moonlight outside, making their way into the hall, forming lines and patches of darkness on the walls. He pauses, takes a breath, pushes the door open, and stops dead. There are two forms in Lenore’s bed. She’s with someone. There’s someone in bed with Lenore. A man is in bed with Lenore. And she’s sitting on top of him. He’s on his back, his knees are raised slightly, and she’s straddling him. And they’re rocking together. Up toward the headboard and back again. She’s naked. Her back is arched and her breasts jut out from her body, angled toward the ceiling, perfectly visible in the blue light of the moon. She’s making a low moaning sound. He’s in her, Ike knows. Whoever he is, he’s inside her. Inside Lenore.

He begins moving backward. Retracing his steps toward the living room. He stops in the doorway, looks at a lamp, and thinks about picking it up, charging back into the bedroom, smashing the lamp’s base into the man’s skull. He could say he thought she was in danger. He was trying to protect her.

But he gives up the idea without making a move, pulls her door closed and locked, and lets himself into his own apartment. He sets all the locks on his front door, then begins to move furniture in front of it that he can lift without any noise. He moves into the kitchen and performs the same procedure on the back door.

Then he goes into his bedroom and sits on the edge of his bed. His hands tremble. There’s a heavy sweat covering his body, but he can’t bring himself to wash up. He falls backward onto the bed, but the position is unbearable. He gets onto the floor, stretches out prone, then rolls underneath the bed. Small clouds of matted dust and lint congregate around his head. He pulls his eyelids together, forced as tight as he can, tiny muscles exerted to their limit. He prays for an instant sleep.