Personal Effects: Dark Art

5

How did he know?

I asked myself this question over and over as the L line train clack-clack-clacked southeast, back on Manhattan Island, far away from The Brink, toward Washington Square Park and my rendez-vous with Lucas. I felt slow, out of sorts. Martin Grace had done exactly what he’d said: pinned me, down to the six-month-old Vans on my feet. And he’d known what I was thinking. No, deeper and weirder than that. He’d known how I was thinking. I’d left Room 507 thirty minutes ago fully clothed, but stripped bare.

I stared at the passing darkness outside the subway, the occasional tunnel light (and accompanying graffiti) breaking the black. My eyes pulled focus from the tunnel wall to the window’s surface. There I was, reflected, just as Martin Grace had described, a MySpace generation refugee, a shaggy-haired painter, an inexperienced poseur. My fingers rushed over the array of colorful buttons pinned to the flap on my canvas satchel. These were my cheerfully ironic, subversive broadcasts to the world; my personality trimmed down to punchy, half-sentence slogans. There Is No Spoon. At Least the War on the Middle Class Is Going Well. Accio New President. Rape Is Fucking Wrong. WYSIWYG. What Would Scooby-Doo?

They now seemed self-referential, hollow, immature.

The train trembled onward. I checked the time on my Eterna, which was indeed an heirloom bequeathed from my late grandfather. 5:30. I tightened my grip around my black Cannondale hybrid bike’s handlebars. I watched my bicycle helmet hanging there, hypnotized by it swaying on its chinstrap.

How did he know?

I closed my eyes, silently asking for some enlightenment, for some distance from this throbbing, full-brain bruise I was experiencing. After a moment, the bespectacled, professorial side of me—the part that I always imagined sounded a bit like Leonard Nimoy—spoke up.

It’s obvious, my logical side said. Martin Grace isn’t blind. He “made” you because he could see you. It explains his description of your clothes, the reference to what you ate at lunch (you had a jam stain on your shirt; you can see it right there, in your reflection), even the fear you experienced when you stepped into Room 507. He’s not blind at all.

I nodded slightly at this, let it roll for a moment. And what about the things he’d said about… me?

Fascinating, my Spock-self replied. If Grace can see, then he did what you do every day at The Brink: He watched your facial expressions and body language and modified his message for maximum impact. His comments were barbed, yes, but generic—after all, you’re not the only twenty-something fretting about filling his professional shoes. Grace’s assumptions about Annie Jackson are equally elementary: He discovered, somehow, that you had lunched together, and exploited that. It’s Ockham’s razor: All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one. Extrapolate. Grace is not blind.

I frowned and opened my eyes. No. He was. I had a folder full of expert diagnoses saying he was. More important, I knew he was, I could feel it… which meant he’d literally smelled my fear, heard things in my voice that I didn’t hear.

Ah, and his intent. That’s what spooked me. He’d wanted to break me. Martin Grace was an old, blind shark, all teeth and hunger. I’d been devoured in there.

So. How did he know? I smelled some truth in what my logical side was saying. If Grace did this evening what I do every day—excavate a mind’s secrets—then what business did an audio engineer have knowing such things? That didn’t make much sense. Not a goddamned bit.

My eyed slid upward, met the gaze of my reflection. There was something missing here. My brain nudged at this like a tongue probing the gap of a missing tooth. I needed more information about Martin Grace, things not in his admittance report. That folder told me what he was, but it didn’t tell me who he was.

A secret smile rose to my lips. I knew a person who could help me. I just had to convince her it was the right thing to do.

The train screeched and slowed, rushing into the bright, tiled expanse of the 6th Avenue—14th Street station. I slipped my helmet from the bike’s handlebars, plunked it on my head. I hefted my Cannondale toward the door. Enough shop thought, for now. It was time to meet up with Lucas… and then with Rachael and Dad. And Gram.

The sun had sunk past New York’s skyline by the time I’d pedaled to “Well7,” Lucas’ nickname for Washington Square Park.

My kid brother is obsessed with slang, constantly inventing oddball words to describe the places and people around him—and always hoping those new words become mini-memes and spread beyond his circle of family and friends. “Well7” is an abbreviation-meets-amalgam of the “W” of Washington and the square you get making an “L” with your left hand and a “7” with your right. An unholy creation, sure, but I found it clever. Even my father, Mr. Windsor Knot, called the park Well7 now.

This pleased Lucas to no end.

I braked the Cannondale near a streetlight and watched my brother from afar. He was a hundred yards away, alone, burning calories around the park’s Arc de Triomphe-inspired seventy-seven-foot marble arch. He was practicing his hobby, parkour.

The brainbendingly fast-paced maneuvers Lucas was performing around—and now on—the Arch have not officially been classified as a sport, although anything that requires this intense level of physical dexterity and stamina falls into that category as far as I’m concerned. Lucas tells me it’s a state of mind, an urban survival philosophy whipped into blurred motion. He insists parkour is a discipline, a martial art whose opponent is the cityscape. I default to his expertise; he’s been doing this for two years now. Last year, my father and I spent Lucas’ nineteenth birthday in St. Vincent’s emergency room after Lucas suffered a nasty drop from a second-story windowsill. Dad’s fancy dinner plans were ruined. He’d fumed the rest of the night.

Them’s the breaks.

Lucas is half-Wikipedia, half-evangelist about all his passions, so everyone he knows, knows a lot about parkour. The word is a truncated, modified version of the French term for a military obstacle course. It’s also called the “art of displacement.” The point of parkour is as simple as its execution is complex: traverse your urban surroundings in the most efficient and speedy means possible. If a fence separates you from your destination, jump it. If it’s a wall, scale it. If it’s a building… well… get all Spider-Man on it. Brick walls are sidewalks for the parkour-proficient.

This is a scrappy, dangerous pastime. I once watched Lucas rocket up the fire escape of a five-story New York University admin building, scramble to its roof in rapid-fire movements evocative of both crab and gorilla, make a running leap to a neighboring building, bound down its fire escape, and land on the sidewalk on all fours, like an unperturbed house cat. By the end of this performance, I’m sure my heart was pounding faster than his.

And here he was in the gloaming of Well7, again dashing toward its legendary Arch, now in the air, now bounding up its surface, side-crawling several feet, now shoving himself upward and backward, away from the marble, twisting his thin frame into a back flip, his body trapped in graceful silhouette for an instant—a black-and-white still of human ambition and freedom, I thought—now landing on his toes, tucking his body into a roll… and now standing, panting, grinning in my direction, glancing back at the thing he’d conquered.

I pedaled over. Lucas yanked the bandanna off his head, freeing his long, curly brown hair, inherited from our mother. His fellow parkour practitioners (called traceurs and traceuses, depending on their sex) called him Socket, in honor of his shock-mop of hair and buzzy, infectious personality. (He usually acts like he’s French-kissed an electrical outlet.)

My brother tugged off his battered backpack, unzipping it in one energetic motion. A cluster of black cables snaked from the bag to his body, down the neck of his loose-fitting long-sleeved T-shirt. I looked a question at him.

“Welcome up, buttercup,” he said as he reached into the bag. He pulled out a compact notebook computer and fussed with a small box attached to the device. The laptop was a “Toughbook,” a seemingly indestructible and very expensive device. Lucas could never afford something like this on the salary of his part-time clerk job at NYU’s admissions office. This was last year’s Christmas gift from our dad.

The cables connected to the PC sprang free. He flipped open the laptop and dropped cross-legged onto the concrete.

“Hey. What’s up?” I asked. I nodded to the computer.

Lucas smiled, his teeth aglow in the LCD light. “You’ll love it, Z,” he said. “You’ll ’dore it.”

He raised a hand high above his head. “Okay, so you’ve got bird’s-eye view,” he said, “and you’ve got worm’s-eye view.” His hand now shot earthward. “And of course, you’ve got first-person POV.”

My brother’s fingers now tapped the side of his head. I nodded. He was talking camera angles. Lucas was a film student at NYU. I couldn’t fathom how Lucas’ professors kept up with his supersonic mind.

His eyes never left the computer screen. His fingers slid across the device’s trackpad, double-clicking as he spoke. “But what about a hand’s-eye view, huh? Or a foot’s-eye view? Right? Yeah?”

He extended his arm. A small plastic gadget was strapped to the top of his hand. He tapped his sneaker, where an identical device was tucked into his shoelaces. Cables extended from these, up into Lucas’ clothes. I blinked, doing the math. He’d rigged tiny vidcams to record his parkour moves.

“HAH!” Lucas cried, watching the ultra-jittery digital footage. “Steadicam, it ain’t—but it works!” He finally looked up at me, gesturing at the cable on his wrist. “These wires are a pain in the conjunction-junction, but still. This’ll come in handy for the project I wanna work on. Totally self-financed, fictionalized reality show. Big Brother meets crime-fighting parkour artist.”

“And do you have a name for this zero-budget adventure?” I asked.

“Traceur Fire,” he said proudly.

I laughed, wondering if this preposterous project would suffer the same fate as most of his invented words. My brother is one of the most ambitious, creative people I know… but there are so many ideas whirring around in his head. He can’t choose which project to prioritize, so he flits between them, hummingbird-style. Never getting too deep.

“I’ll tell you all about it later,” Lucas said as he unplugged the cables and cameras, stuffing the gear into his backpack. “But it’s gonna be epic, man. So what about you, Z? You experience anything epic today?”

I laughed again. Yeah, you could say that.

I gave him today’s highlights as we traveled from Well7 to my apartment on Avenue B in Alphabet City. We had about an hour to get to the funeral home where Gram’s memorial service was being held.

I pedaled and Lucas bounded along beside me, occasionally busting out into a low-key parkour move. His body deftly pitched around streetlights and trash bins.

“Hey, how’re you dealing with it?” I asked him. “Losing Gram?”

“Freedom’s on the march,” Lucas replied. “Seriously? Aching, but mending. All the signs were there, Z. I just didn’t want to see ’em. But when she died, the pieces finally clicked into place, like Lego bricks. Click. She’s gone. Click. We’re still here. Click. We mourn, we move on.”

“That’s pretty damned insightful of you,” I said.

“That reminds me. Hang on a sec.”

Lucas removed his green backpack and opened it. He closed one eye, concentrating, as his hand dove into the pack. He looked like he was about to pull a rabbit from a hat. I grinned.

“Thought you’d want to see these,” he said, passing me a cardboard box. “These were Gram’s family pictures, going way back. There’re some docs in there, too. I scanned some of ’em for the multimedia slideshow at the memorial.”

“There’s not going to be a dry eye in the house, is there?” I asked.

“Nope.”

We stood there, smiling and thinking of her. It was an uncomplicated moment. Nice.

And despite what was still to come that night—the funeral home, my screaming father and the lunatic stranger, the folded slip of paper that would be pressed into my sweating palms—I can honestly say that this moment with my brother was the last time I’ve remembered feeling carefree.

The rest has been darkness and madness and terrible.