The Christmas Kid

Gone

WHETHER HE WAS AWAKE or asleep, the New York craziness never left Hirsch alone. Sometimes he tried to tell his wife, Margaret, about his dreams — the dark roaring tunnels, the gleaming yellow eyes of the leopard perched in the backyard tree, the baby with the metal tongue who never stopped screaming. She would always cut him off. “Hirsch,” she would say. “Calm down. You’re letting it get to you, Hirsch. You’re sounding paranoid, Hirsch.”

“Yes,” Hirsch would say. “But I do have enemies.”

Waking, a mask of calm pasted to his face, Hirsch would leave for the advertising agency promptly each morning at nine. He no longer took the subway from Brooklyn Heights. Junkies waited in the doorways near the station, he thought, and the subway was itself a brutal morning assault, an iron purgatory jammed with knife artists, hammer swingers, lobotomized crazies. They, too, inhabited his dreams, spraying paint down his throat, ramming switchblades into his heart, slicing him with smiles on their faces. Them. He was afraid of Them. Blacks and whites, people speaking mysterious languages, young men with eyes full of ancient evil: Them. Now Hirsch drove a car. A dark blue Oldsmobile. In a car, he wouldn’t have to deal with Them.

Except that on this rainy Brooklyn morning, the car was gone.

“They’ve stolen the car,” he said, coming back up the stoop of the brownstone, his eyes wild: “They took the car!”

Margaret calmed Hirsch and called the police. Then she arranged for a car service to pick him up and take him across the bridge to work. Hirsch waited inside the vestibule for the car, seeing killers and marauders walking down his street. They don’t work, he thought; they patrol. They come around like rats, seeking weakness and vulnerability, and then they strike. I should have a gun. I should be able to shoot all of them.

There were two policemen in the reception room of the advertising agency when Hirsch arrived with his coffee and danish. Someone had broken into the office during the night and stolen two IBM Selectrics. The cops looked weary as they made notes in spiral pads.

“They wrecked the Xerox machine, too,” said Ruthie, the receptionist. “Just poured rubber cement into it and ruined it. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” Hirsch said. “I can imagine.”

Hirsch went into his office and sat at his desk. One of his desk drawers was open. Suddenly, Hirsch was afraid, as if one of the intruders might still be watching, examining his courage from a distance. They had been here, a gang of Them, invaders from the darkness, and they had rummaged through this small part of the world that was his. Hirsch hurried out to tell the cops. They were gone.

“You mean they didn’t take fingerprints or anything?” Hirsch asked. Ruthie laughed. “Come on, Mr. Hirsch. They don’t do stuff like that anymore.” She powdered her nose. “They just fill out the forms for the insurance company.”

That was typical. The craziness was now general. Thievery, robbery, violence; knives, guns, blood, and pain. They were as natural now as breathing. He examined his desk. Nothing had been taken except a cheap old onyx-handled letter opener his wife had bought for him during their honeymoon in Acapulco in 1958. Of course. If they could, they would steal only the small things that you loved. Hirsch was very still for a long time, and then worked through the morning in a gray fog, trying to infuse his copy with images of joy and romance. His wife called to say that all the forms had been filled out about the stolen car. Hirsch ate lunch at his desk, then napped on his couch.

Again, he saw the leopard in the garden, its eyes the color of typhoid. The baby with the metal tongue screamed in a higher pitch. He saw gray horses leaping from a pier and a woman in a white dress on the deck of a boat receding into a dark sea. He awoke with chills.

The afternoon was a blur. He went home at four, another car service picking him up at the curb, outside his office. When he got to Brooklyn Heights, he froze.

The blue Oldsmobile was parked across the street from his house.

Hirsch paid the car service and felt his heart twitching. He went over to his car, walking around it as if it were booby-trapped. No dents. No graffiti. But there was an envelope stuck to the steering wheel. Scrawled on the outside were the words: “To the Owner.”

Cautiously, Hirsch unlocked the door and opened the envelope. It contained two theater tickets to Dreamgirls and a typed note.

The note was not signed. But Hirsch was suddenly flooded with a feeling of redemption and hope. His car was back! One of Them had explained himself. One of Them even had offered reparations. Hirsch rushed up the stairs to tell his wife, and she laughed, and told him it just proved that New York was not as crazy as Hirsch thought it was, and said that they really should celebrate. The tickets were for that night. They should use them.

“Why not, Hirsch?” Margaret asked. “We can drive the car to Manhattan, so it shouldn’t get stolen again.”

Hirsch immediately agreed. He made a reservation at Frankie & Johnnie’s for after the theater, took a hot bath, dressed in his best suit. He thought his wife looked beautiful. He wished the kids, grown up and moved away, could see her like this. And at 7:15 they went off to the theater. Margaret enjoyed the show more than Hirsch did; he simply didn’t identify with the problems of show-business people. But still, it was a Broadway show, a night in New York.

With an act of will, he ignored the crazies, the autograph nuts, the shopping-bag ladies, the junkies and knifers and walking wounded of Times Square. The lamb chops at the restaurant were delicious. They drove home in near silence, Hirsch saying that such nights were what made him love New York in the years when he and Margaret were young.

“Now, if you find a parking spot, “Margaret said, “it will be a perfect night.”

“Maybe our benefactor, the thief, will hold one for us,” Hirsch said, and they both laughed.

They cruised the streets of Brooklyn Heights for twenty minutes, and finally found a spot. They strolled home hand in hand, and Hirsch went up the stoop with his key out. He opened the door and right away knew that something was wrong. The framed lithograph of the Brooklyn Bridge was gone. He motioned for Margaret to wait, and stepped inside to the right, where the living room was. Everything was gone. Paintings, photographs, chairs, couch, lamps, tables. The kitchen, too, had been emptied. He went back to the staircase and looked upstairs into the darkness, but he didn’t move.

“They took everything,” he whispered, backing up, fear rising in a wide band across his back. “They’ve been here. They’ve got it all.”

And now he wanted to run. Margaret took his arm, her face ashen, as they stared into the violated, plundered house.

“There’s a leopard in the yard.” Hirsch said. “It’s in the tree.” His eyes were wide with horror. “It has yellow eyes.”

Then, in the quiet street, with a slight breeze combing the trees, and a half-moon crossing the city, Hirsch held onto the railing, threw back his head, and began to scream.