This Side of Brightness

chapter 14. now that we’re happy

He was living up there on 131st Street. He’d got himself mostly silence for a life now. But you see I loved him more than anything else in the world, so we’d all visit much as we could. Like I told you, he’d been making furniture. But for some reason he took to deciding, right at the very end of his life, that he’d make a fiddle. And he got some wood and he carved it out and it was shaped like a fiddle — like this, ya know? Some people call it a violin. He had garnet paper, and he wrapped it around a cork and he sat out there all day, varnishing and carving and sanding. Then he got some horsehair, shit knows where, and strung his-self a bow. He said that music’d been some sort of gift in his life, there’d been this important piano and all. My grandmother even played a piano down the tunnels, but that’s something else altogether. Wrap yourself in that blanket there, sister. Anyways, yeah. So he’d be there making tea in his apartment and waiting to go down to the stoop to work on his fiddle and he had this thing, this tea cosy, to keep the pot warm. It belonged to my grandmother’s mother, Maura O’Leary. And one day when he’s making tea he just leaves it on his head! It was something his kids did to him once. Even did it for me when I was a kid. Just cause he liked it, it was funny to him. And maybe he liked it there, on his own head, like it was keeping his memories warm or something.

And he’d go on down and sit there on 131st with his half-made fiddle and this goddamn tea cosy on his head. He got laughed at, but he didn’t care; he was dying, he allowed hisself some of that there eccentricity, ya know? I bought him a Walkman once — I had money back then — but he didn’t take no truck in those sort of things. Damn, he even got a small cosy for my Lenora, but she didn’t like to wear it, can’t rightly blame her. We was visiting lots and sitting out there with him on the stoop and those were the good days, the best of days. And we was all there — Lenora too — when he played that fiddle for the first time. Man, he played so bad, it sounded terrible, man; it was awful, right? But it was beautiful too. And he sang this song which is a blues song which don’t go with no fiddle, and it goes, Lord, I’m so lowdown I think I’m looking up at down. We was so happy sitting there on the stoop that we went changed the words, and we were singing, Lord, I’m so high up I believe I’m looking down at up. Cars going by. We even heard some gunshots far on down the street, but we didn’t pay no mind.

Which is one of the things I always do find myself thinking about. Looking up at down and looking down at up. I never heard nicer than that, no matter which way you believe it.

I know you’re cold, sister, but I’m cold too. And, man, it was the coldest day when I went to his apartment. Dancesca and Lenora, they’re making visits to her family; we all of us got two families no matter which way we think on it. Like ol’ Faraday. I went on up the stairs and I was smoking then — no, no — cigarettes; cigarettes, sister — and so I always made sure that I stubbed it out in the flowerpot just one floor down from his apartment, ’cause I told him I’d given up the smoking.

I told you. Later.

Anyways. Listen up.

Just me on my own, knocking on the door. Normally he’d be curled up on the couch or something, in some amount of pain, but this time he just opened the door for me — it was 1986 and he was eighty-nine and he was shoving close to timber. But this time he opened up the door and said, I saw you coming down the street, son. He was all done up in his overcoat and scarf and that damn stupid tea cosy. I went on in and took off my coat and sat myself down and turned on the TV and this baseball game came on, see, the Yankees and the Red Sox. He asked me who’s winning? And I told him the Yankees just scored, even though they hadn’t. He had this old friend who liked the Dodgers and the Yankees. So it made my grandaddy happy if the Yankees won. Yankees just hit a homer, I said. And then he just came on over to the couch and said, Let’s you and me take a walk. I says to him, It’s cold out, but he says, I’m feeling good today, I could walk a million miles. Let’s watch the game, I said, but then he just reached out and dragged me up from the seat — he had some power still — and we put on our overcoats and went outside. Here’s this old man with a tea cosy on his head and outside it’s colder’n fuck and the only ones about are a couple of guys selling smack and sprung.

We went on down the deli and bought ourselves a copy of the Daily News, and I never seen him with so much energy. I heard sometimes if you know you’re gonna die then you get energy.

Y’ain’t gonna die, Angela, come on.

And then, see, he shoved some tobacco in his mouth but I didn’t say nothing even though I wanted a cigarette. He always said he was old enough to be allowed a vice, said the one thing an old man regrets in his life is that he behaved hisself so well. So, anyways, we went on to the subway and changed a couple of times and went all the way down to that tunnel that he dug way way back. We went out and we was standing by the East River near a pile of rubbish by the old Customs House, when he says to me, he says, There’s a gold ring under that there river. Your own great-grandmomma’s, he says, and I says I know, ’cause he told me a million times. And then he says to me — you know what he says? — he says, I’d like to walk through that there tunnel and say hello to my old friend Con, he says, that’s what I’d like to do.

And I says, Huh?

I’d like to walk under that there river, he says.

And, course, I says, You’re crazy. And he just sighs and says, Come on, we’ll go down and just ride that train.

We can’t walk the tunnel, I says.

I said ride the train, he says. Ride, son.

So we went on down the steps — I won’t never forget it — we put in the tokens, and I helped him on down the steps. He still had his walking stick. At the edge of the platform we waited for the M train — it’s the M train, isn’t it? Yeah. And when it arrived, brakes squealing, he held me back by the elbow and stared at me in the eyes like this and said, he says, How about it? And I said, You wanna walk under the river? It’s Sunday, he said, let’s wait for the next one and see how long it takes ’tween trains. Might be much as half an hour. On Sundays they don’t run so good. I don’t know how long it took, but it was damn near thirty-five minutes and — I swear to whoever be up there, I swear — we looked at each other and laughed, my grandaddy and me. Then the door of that train closed and the platform was left empty save us. And we went nodded at each other. Right, he says, just a few short yards, that’s all. And we slapped hands. I was quick then — quicker’n now — and I vaulted on down onto the tracks and reached up to take ahold of him, help him down. We don’t have to do it, I says, and he says, I’d like to. It’s what I want to do. Just a couple of yards.

Watch out for the third rail, I says. And he’s all happy, saying, I know what the third rail is, son.

And then he asks me, Y’all got a lighter? And I asks why. And he says in case the train comes early, we can flick it so’s the driver sees us.

I gave him the lighter and asked him how long it’d take us to walk, and he says fifteen minutes give or take. And I says, We best hurry.

We moved on down a few feet beyond the platform and made our way into the dark. Darker’n any tunnel. I ain’t ashamed to say we went hand in hand.

Gimme your hand there.

I know you’re cold. Here, take my gloves.

Along the middle of the track, down the slope of the tunnel, he let go of my hand and held on to my shoulder, walked behind a pace. It was like we was blindfolded. I don’t know why we didn’t stop, but we kept on going. And all the time I’m thinking, We shoulda brought a flashlight with us. And then he’s pointing out all sorts of things in the tunnel: the strip of red and white metal on the wall, the curves, some place where a welder went on fire.

That tunnel — nobody living there, of course. Nobody could live there. Too narrow. But there’d been people through there, graffiti artists; there was that guy, COST REVS 2000, and all sorts of other graffiti, except nobody like Papa Love; ain’t nobody in the world can draw like Papa Love. We stayed close together. And I’m thinking, Up there, there’s boats on the water, and Brooklyn and Manhattan, and we’re walking under the river. We were shaking with the cold and damp. I was looking back scared over my shoulder. I was all right then. I mean, I wasn’t fucked up. I wasn’t fucked up in the head.

I know I ain’t, Angela.

Yeah, you’re cute too.

Sunshine and cigarettes.

But listen.

Just listen.

We shoulda gone back, but we didn’t. The tunnel was all curvy and quiet, and he takes the lighter and flicks it close to the ground a few times. Roundabout here, he says, is the wedding band. All I see is nothing but a pile of gravel and a few pebbles, but he looks up to the roof, the ceiling, whatever, and I asked him if he found the ring and he says, Just a minute. The top of the lighter was burning his thumb. Come on! I says. Just a minute, he says, I’m having a look here. Come on come on come on! He went closed the hood on the lighter, looks up, and says to the ceiling, Yankees are one up as we speak! I was getting scared then, and I was feeling bad, ’cause the Yankees hadn’t hit a homer at all, but I didn’t say nothing. I’m scared. So I grab the Zippo and take ahold of his overcoat and drag him along the flat part of the tunnel. No rats, no Skagerak, no Barents, nothing — just our breath — and he says, I remember, and I says, Remember what? and he says, I disremember.

And I says, Come on.

Holy Name, he says, which is what he said sometimes.

Move it! I says. So I reach backward and drag him by the sleeve. I’m trying to keep the Zippo lit, but it keeps flaring out on me. Keeping well away from the third rail and all. Down the center of the tracks. Faster and faster, me tugging at the overcoat. He can hardly move, and, me, I’m wondering if I might have to carry him.

I’m all right, leave me alone, Angie. I’m all right.

Angie. Angela. Whatever.

Just listen.

Maybe he felt some youngness going on through him, some shit like that, eighty-nine years old but suddenly nineteen; he mighta been following himself into his past — one, two, three, strike, return — and he mighta been rising once more — through the tunnel and the river and all — but he’s not. I’m just dragging him along, and in the distance we see the lights from the subway station — they’re still a ways away — and I’m screaming now, screaming, Come on! Come on! He stops for a moment and puts his hands on his knees and bends over and says, I haven’t felt this good in years.

And then he was just standing, staring. Maybe he recognized the corner. Maybe he was remembering things. But he weren’t moving. So I tugged him harder and harder. His feet going thump-thump on the ground and I see the platform and I’m thinking, Man, we’re home free, we are home free. We get there, right? We’ve walked under the river. All the way, one side to the other. He puts his walking stick up, and then I hear the rumble and a big blast of horn explodes from a train and two headlights flare far away, and me — I’m quick — me, I’m up on the platform and reaching down to grab him, under the armpits, pull him up — lights of the train coming — and one hand slips and he grabs again and the hat falls — that’s what’s horrible, you know, it’s the tea cosy; it’s the stupidest thing in the world — and he reaches to get it, and I try to grab him, and him, he looks at me, and I swear to whatever be up there — I swear, I swear it, I loved him, I loved him, I loved him, Angie — he was looking up at me, and his face was wanting to be saying, it was like it was saying, What do we do now, son, now that we’re happy?

* * *

There is this dream: Clarence Nathan is chopping his hands off and sucking out the marrow in his bones until there is a hollow corridor along which he walks, as high with despair as Manhattan.

* * *

Dancesca looked after me. She was sad as hell too. And Lenora, there was no end of crying. She even put his walking stick in her aquarium, but it kept falling out. I mean, nobody been missed more in the world more’n that old man been missed. I keep seeing it in my head — the train dragging him along and along. And me there on the platform screaming. And the train wheels screeching. And then all of a sudden the biggest silence you ever did hear. I couldn’t do nothing after that. I was paralyzed. Nothing there in my hands. I loved him more’n any man can love a man.

No, I ain’t sad.

I ain’t crying.

I said I ain’t.

And see here, see this — see — this is when I first done this. See, I’m thinking about murdering my hands and everything I touch — shit — I touch everything twice like this. Or this. Still do it sometimes, but not that much. Just habit now. But — back then — if I can’t touch it twice I go crazy, like someone’s gone hollowed out half my body. I went back to the ’scrapers but I weren’t doing much good, took me a long time to climb, my head’s going thump thump and I know they’re thinking about firing me. So, one night, I stayed up there on the top of the ’scraper — we were up to forty-seven floors then — with this friend of mine, Cricket. He gave the guards a few bucks so they’d leave us alone. It was cold, the stars were out. I was feeling terrible; my head was going thump thump thump thump. The steel was treacherous ’cause it had rained earlier and froze a little. The city was all lit up, like it is sometimes.

You see, to me it was like one of those photos where all the lights are blurry ’cause the shutter’s left on, know what I’m saying?

We went up the ladder, we was buzzing a little, we drank a couple of beers. Cricket kept saying, You must be out of your mind. But I was thinking about my grandfather and nothing was gonna stop me. We got to the decking and I went up one of the beams that goes like an X. No problem, but Cricket he’s a bit jittery on account of being a little buzzing. Eventually he came on up too, I never seen him climb so slow. I took the cigarettes outa my pocket.

Anyways, I lit one of them and tossed it in the air to the other end of the beam where Cricket was, but he kept missing them mostly. I didn’t have any candles, but you shoulda seen those little red ends going through the air. Once or twice Cricket caught one and he’d cup his hands around it, but most of them cigarettes fell right over the side of the building, caught by the nets down below, I suppose. But you shoulda seen those little red ends. Like this. I musta lit two packs. Flinging them through the air. And I sat on that beam all night long, and I ain’t ashamed to tell you that I cried like a baby. I just sat there and kept trying to throw those cigarettes all night long, ’cause it was the only thing I could think of.

And that was when I stamped a cigarette down. That was the first time, I s’pose.

Shit, yeah, it hurt but I didn’t feel it.

Burnt a little hole on the back of this hand, like a crater. Then this hand, before Cricket could stop me. He took ahold of me and he said, I’m sorry, man. Put his arms around me and said, It’s gonna be all right. Before morning we went home and Dancesca, she’s all frantic, she’s going crazy, sits me down, she’s all loving me and all, she put some of her poultice on my hand. She had this family poultice recipe.

Yeah, it’s like yellow healing stuff.

Oh, she got brown eyes and beautiful, looks a lot like you.

Nice teeth, yeah.

I told you we’ll get the candy.

Three in the morning maybe.

But Angie. Angela.

You shoulda seen those little red ends going through the air.

* * *

He watches the patterns the paper clips make. He straightens the bends fully out, holds the elongated metal over the flame from the gas stove.

The metal heats and reddens and he uses tiny pliers to bend the metal around. It curves very slightly, and he blows on it to let it cool and harden. Clarence Nathan swipes a hair back from his eyes. He must be careful; it is easy to break the paper clip. He uses the pliers to hold the clip over the gas flame, makes patient curves in the metal. When he is finished the clip looks like the body of a slinking snake. There are other patterns too: the shape of a boat, a tiny eye, a pyramid, a shovel.

Clarence Nathan moves away from the stove to the kitchen table — bare feet feeling the cold nailheads in the wooden floor — where he sits and smokes, watching the spirals of blue air above him. In the corner, a television sizzles with gray snow. All else is fabulously quiet. He lays the paper clips on the kitchen counter to cool, and when they are ready he heats them individually until they are red hot and glowing. He puts the clips to his arms and presses down on them with his fist until the pain shoots itself through him.

Closing his eyes, he clenches his teeth and the tendons in his neck pop and a massive roar comes from his throat. Dancesca has heard it often enough that she doesn’t even stir from the bedroom anymore.

His heart doesn’t feel in any way involved, only his body. The sensation of it. The deliciousness. He welcomes it, greets it: the body as his form, the pain as its content. His skin looks like a desert scape of these imprinted patterns, equally scorched on both sides of his body, burnt on with the curiosity of an onlooker.

He has even melted them into his feet, so that, at night, when he walks barefoot along the floor it looks as if these patterns are moving all over him. He tries to remember how many months it has been since Walker’s death — and if it is three, he decides that it’s four; and if it is five, he decides that it’s six; and if it is September, an odd month, he decides that it has become October.

Outside, when he walks on sidewalks, he always makes sure that his feet don’t touch the cracks. He counts as he walks; his footsteps end on even numbers. Occasionally he even retraces his steps just to get the number correct. Then he must go back and forth to make sure there is even pressure on his left and right foot. At the entrance to a grocery store, he steps up and steps down. The clerks watch him closely. After buying cigarettes, he says to them, “Thank you thank you.” He returns home to his paper clips. Continues to scrimshaw his torso.

Dancesca creates big dinners to punctuate the evening hush. He sits at the table and taps his forks against empty plates. Lenora asks him why he eats with two forks. He tells her that it’s a special game and she too begins it, until her mother whispers in her ear.

Later his daughter says, “Daddy, are you crazy?”

“Go to the bedroom, girl, right now,” says Dancesca.

She looks at Clarence Nathan and says, “She just gets these notions.”

At work the foremen have noticed something curious: he must touch everything with both hands. On his thirty-first birthday, in 1986, he insists that he is thirty. They have heard about the cigarettes. It has become a ritual now. They fire him and, in the unemployment office, he fills out the forms twice.

At home, he turns off the television set. He needs to turn the knob with his left hand for balance. But the knob won’t turn any more, so he switches the set on. Then turns it off again. Realizes that his right hand has been neglected. He reaches out for the knob once more. The screen flares to life.

On off on off on off.

On.

Off.

Until he can’t remember which was first. Was it on? Was it off? He grabs at his hair. He lies on the floor, puts on his boots, laces them equally tight, and then smashes the television with both feet. The glass splays. He reaches inside the set and is delighted to count an even number of shattered pieces. Taping them back together, he smashes his feet through the glass once more.

Clarence Nathan sits on the floor, rocking back and forth, his head in his hands.

In the morning he must prepare two cups of coffee. Drink them alternately. Paste butter on four slices of bread. Make sure the strawberry jam has an even number of seeds.

There is a gentle throbbing in his brain if he doesn’t portion himself out equally. Return and collection, return and collection.

In the room, there is something about the couch that makes him uncomfortable. He sees a ghost there and he avoids it.

“Now swear on it,” he says aloud to nobody.

“I swear.”

“Swear on your life that you ain’t gonna give her another dime.”

“I swear on it.”

All repeated twice.

Once he dials Information and gets a number for a Nathan Walker in Manhattan; he hears a voice answer and he replaces the receiver without saying a word. Then he picks up the receiver with his left hand, dials, lays the phone down a second time. For a moment suicide scratches the side of his brain. He lets it rest there and gouge a ditch into his thoughts.

* * *

We had a nice apartment, see. On West End Avenue. Up on the fifth floor, except we didn’t have a view or anything, but it was nice. I’d been making money on the ’scrapers. Back then an ironworker could make fifty grand a year. We had money in the bank. We were doing okay, even though the money’s going down some. The union had good insurance.

Thirty-two or so.

Now? Thirty-six, I think. How old’re you?

Take it easy, don’t crash.

Anyways, I was staying in Lenora’s room. It’s with this yellow wallpaper and the aquarium and all, and she’s getting older; she’s got movie stars in there now, boys from school, singers too — Stevie Wonder, Kool & the Gang. She don’t like being away from the aquarium, but the room is for me to get my head together; that’s why I’m staying there. So she’s sleeping with Dancesca. But Lenora, she comes in and visits all the time. I rig a blue light there above the aquarium and it goes shining down into the plastic, and she likes that. It was bright at the top and darker at the bottom, just like a real aquarium. Even ol’ Faraday woulda liked that. Once we went together down to Penn Station, me and Lenora, and we got ourselves one of those photos in the photo booth with the swivel seat, four pictures of her and me, and they went on top of the aquarium. See, I still got one, see?

Yeah.

And, see, every day she brings in plates of food to me. Sandwiches and coffee and all. Milk in a nice little jug. Even the crusts cut off the sandwiches. And she’s there, looking at me and asking me, Daddy, why can’t you have any knives with your food? Daddy, how come Mommy says you can’t have shoelaces?

Sometimes Dancesca comes in too, and she sits on the end of the bed and she cuts my hair and says to me, she says, It could happen to anybody. It weren’t your fault. And she’d bring Lenora in to kiss me good night and all. She’s the best child. I mean, she got that aquarium on her wall, right? And there’s Walker, at the very top. I found the negative in the kitchen cupboard, went to the photo shop, made another copy, then another and another, until he was swimming all around me. I made I don’t know how many copies. I suppose I shoulda gone to the nuthouse but I paid a couple of visits, outpatient. And they was telling me that I was fine, that I was just inventing this all for myself. They had all these speech people and psychologists and all saying how I’m very interesting, ’cause there’s no chemical imbalance, when they give me drugs it just gets worse, so they don’t give me drugs anymore, and Dancesca, she tells them she’ll look after me. And she does. She looks after me real good. She makes sure I’m okay. And dinnertime, she lays out the table real nice with a cloth and she doesn’t say a word even though I’m doing that switch with the fork still. And we’re talking small talk and happy enough, I’m getting my head together. But I’m drinking some, getting the money from Dancesca’s purse. Going up to the liquor store where they got it cheap. Sometimes a bottle a day.

Uh-huh.

She’s cutting hair to make money, and Lenora’s at school, and I’m home most of the time and we even bought a new TV after I smashed the first one.

I don’t know, Angie. Maybe I was.

Shit, everyone’s a bit crazy, ain’t they?

What?

No.

Don’t leave.

Stay here. The sun’ll come up. Here, look, I got three pairs of socks. Put ’em on. Put ’em on your hands, I don’t care. I don’t care about nothing anymore. I never told nobody this story. Here. Put them on.

Why don’t you want the blue ones?

Oh. Yeah. No problem. I forgot.

But they ain’t washcloths.

Whatever.

Don’t get frostbit.

Look, look how it is. Ain’t it nice? Don’t leave, Angie. Just sit here till the sun comes up, then we see it real nice.

Uh-huh.

Tide’s out.

Yeah yeah yeah, cold sand, ain’t that something?

Don’t leave, Angie.

Elijah?

Elijah’s got nothing but a fucked-up shoulder. He’ll kill you anyway. You saw what he did to Castor. Just pull the goddamn blanket up and listen.

Angela. Listen. You gotta tell me something.

You gotta tell me that y’ain’t gonna hate me.

Just tell me.

’Cause I don’t want you to hate me.

Just tell me that, ’cause Dancesca she hates me, Lenora too. They went off, and I never even seen them since. So you just gotta tell me that you ain’t gonna hate me.

* * *

At the Port Authority bus station he meets Dancesca and Lenora. They have spent two weeks in Chicago with relatives. The three of them take a taxi home together. He asks the driver to stop near a parking meter and he does his trick, but Dancesca doesn’t watch; she keeps her head down as he moves from one parking meter to the other. He stretches his arms out, imploring her to watch, until Lenora rolls the window down and says, “Mommy wants you to get back in the car.”

* * *

It’s been bad, see. I been going a little crazy. Lenora, she’s been asking questions, like, Why you don’t have a job anymore? And, Why does Mommy say you’re sick? And, Why does Mommy want to go see her cousins in Chicago all the time? Little things like this. She’s about nine or ten and she’s looking up at me and asking me these questions. Sometimes, when I go to the bathroom or I’m watching TV or something, she’d go switching my photo around in her aquarium, so sometimes I’d be at the bottom where all the plankton was. That’s making me feel bad, but I don’t say anything, not a word. She’s got these small eyes for a little girl, most kids got big eyes, but hers are small. And a scar on her ear where she fell off a tricycle. She’s looking up at me. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s the little things break your heart.

Yeah, I remember the story. You were in the backseat.

Now you see it, Angie. Well, almost. When the sun is up fully.

Yeah. I remember that too. Your old man.

That Cindy girl sure can dance.

But listen. I have to tell you this.

Listen.

See, a lot of the time we go down the park and it’s all three of us, and if it’s wet I slide down twice with the towel underneath my ass and if it’s dry she climbs on up, but she’s getting a little old for the slide, she don’t like it too much, but she likes the swings, maybe they remind her of when times were all right with us, before I was so fucked up in the head. Maybe she’s remembering that. Sometimes Dancesca and me sit on the benches and she says to me, You gotta pull yourself together. And I know that. I mean, it’s not me that’s doing this to me. It’s just my head. It’s just, you know, the playground—

The one on 97th there.

Yeah.

All right, already. Just take it easy, okay?

Put your head on my shoulder. There you go. That’s nice. Don’t that feel good?

I ain’t whispering.

I ain’t crying.

Angie.

I’m in the room, ya know? I been in the room a few days. Just laying there. Alone. And then I hear all these kids coming in and I say to myself, What the hell’s that? I came outa the room and all these kids are there with nice clothes on and all. Lenora’s friends. It got all silent when I came out. And there’s this big cake on the table. Lenora, she comes up to me and says, It’s my birthday, Daddy. And then I get that hollowness in my stomach like I told you about, and I says, Happy birthday, happy birthday. And I see this huge cake on the table. So I go into the kitchen and get some money out of Dancesca’s purse, the last five dollars. We don’t have a lot of money, even our savings gone down. I weren’t working on the ’scrapers no more. Hid that money in my pocket. Went on outside and went to the supermarket where they got a cake shop. But when I came back it wasn’t as big as the first cake. So I go to the kitchen drawer, and Dancesca she grabs me by the wrist and says, Put that knife back. I’m only gonna cut the cake, I says. And she says, It’s Lenora’s birthday, let Lenora cut the cake. And I says, Please, I just wanna arrange the pieces.

I don’t know why. But Dancesca she gives me this smile like she understands and she kisses me on the cheek.

So I cut the cake and arrange all the pieces on two plates so that they’re equal size. Put ’em on large white plates.

’Cause I like things equal.

Yeah.

And I think that mighta been one of the times I felt the very best, just sitting there in that room watching the kids eat that birthday cake, even though Lenora didn’t have a chance to cut it and there was just one piece with all the birthday candles on it. And I was happy. Just sitting there, being a father. And after all them kids left, Dancesca she was cleaning up and she says to Lenora, Why don’t you go down the park with your daddy?

Now, she’s getting older, Lenora, but for some reason she still likes them swings. Getting taller and filling out and puberty coming along and all, but she loves them. She could go on them swings all day long. So we went down. It was summer. Garbage in the playground. Cherry blossoms out along the walkways topside. We’re at the swing together. Her hair is done in braids. She swings happily and calls for a push. All I wants to do is give her a greater lift. I stand behind her. She just about fits on the small wooden swing, and her feet make these curves in the air. At first I’m just pushing the metal chains forward. She’s laughing. It’s not on purpose.

I swear it.

It’s just that my hand — this hand — comes around the chain. I only brush her on the very edge, just a light finger touch, and she doesn’t even notice and she’s calling again for more height — she’s wearing her birthday dress — and, shit, I don’t mean to, I’m just pushing her, hands at her armpits, and Dancesca is coming along the pathway, carrying three cans of Coca-Cola, but I see her and my hands rest against the metal chains once more. But you see, I did it again.

And then I did it again. At the swings.

And then I did it one night in the bedroom and she was wearing a little nightdress and I says to Lenora, It’s our little game, but it’s just around her armpits, that’s all it is, it’s just that I’m stroking around her armpits.

No.

No fucking way.

No.

I ain’t gonna tell you again.

It’s not that.

I ain’t crying.

It’s just that I’m cold, that’s all. Cold making my nose runny.

Listen up. Please.

This woman, see, she had made an appointment ’cause she said something was happening at school with Lenora. And I remember ’cause when she came in she looked at my hands and they was all scarred up and all. With cigarette burns and them paper clips. I went tucked my hands in under my ass and I was just sitting there waiting. I’m sitting at the table with Dancesca. The social worker, she came in and she seemed nice to Dancesca, but she wouldn’t say nothing to me; she just said, If you’d give us a moment, please, Mister Walker.

It’s the first time in years anyone called me that: Mister Walker. But, see, that name makes me feel like I got nothing in my body, like I been carved out, so I just leave the room. I was drinking pretty heavy then. I had this gin in the room. I’m just climbing into the bottle. Not even listening at the door or nothing. Then the door closes and I hear Dancesca in the kitchen. She’s rumbling in the cupboards. I’m looking at the aquarium. She has a knife when she comes into my room but she doesn’t use the knife, it’s just in case. She stands in front of me with the knife. And then she just slaps me and leaves my face in my shoulder, and then she moves away and the sting of her hand is in my face and I’m thinking, Slap me on the other side, slap me on the other side, but she’s gone. She’s in the other bedroom. Slap me on the other side, slap me on the other side. I went and stood in the doorway. I’m watching her. She reaches for the suitcases. She loads her clothes without folding them, stuffs two of the suitcases tight. She clamps down the locks. Then she moves past me as if I’m nothing but air. Lenora’s not around, she’s still at school. Dancesca, she opens Lenora’s cupboard and holds up a training bra. You recognize this? she says to me, and then she buries her head once more and goes to filling the suitcase. She loads all of Lenora’s clothes and then rips the sheet of blue plastic off the wall, gathers the photos from the ground, and throws the one of me at me. And she says to me, Pervert. You’re nothing but a pervert.

And I can’t say nothing.

I’m paralyzed, like I told you.

She ain’t a bitch.

She ain’t a bitch no way.

No, I didn’t touch her there.

No!

Yeah, just the armpits. Not anywhere else.

I never touched that. Not the nipple.

Just around there.

I didn’t—

She was just a child.

Just a child, Angie. Just a child.

I didn’t mean nothing by it.

I never even saw her once after that. Dancesca, she took her from school and went to her folks and she won’t listen to anything I got to say when I try to phone her and then she disappears altogether; they say she’s not around, both of them gone, they say she’s in New York, doesn’t want to talk to me, but I know where she is, I know she’s in Chicago.

I been thinking about goin’ up there, yeah. Sometime.

Angie.

Angie!

No. No way. I never touched her there, I swear, I never did, I swear on it, and that’s the truth, never there.

It wasn’t that, it wasn’t a hard-on, it was nothing like that.

I wasn’t touching her like you think.

No.

Listen!

I mean, it’s what I been trying to say. I’d be there in her room and I’d be touching her shoulders and my head’d be spinning and I’d be out of control and thinking something else. I mean, it wasn’t a hard-on, you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, it was something else, but Dancesca wouldn’t listen and nobody would listen; I guess I didn’t listen myself, I was pretty fucked up in the head it was going thump thump thump thump like I told you.

I been thinking on it more and more. I ain’t never told anybody this before. I mean, we all got a history in us, yeah? A man is what he loves and that’s the reason he loves it.

That ain’t shit.

No.

Ah, Angie, no.

No, Angie.

Don’t do that.

I mean, look.

Out there.

Can’t you see? See, I told you the sun’d come up. See. Now you can see it. It’s gray and all, but ain’t it nice? Hey. Angie.

Shit, I mean that’s what I meant. You said you hadn’t seen it before, Angie.

Angie.

You said you wanted to see the sea.

Fuck candy.

Yeah, that’s my goddamn candy. I ain’t got any goddamn candy. And I ain’t gonna get any either. Fuck candy.

Fuck candy!

Angie.

Hey, Angie. You can’t go there.

He’ll kill you. Angela!

You dropped my goddamn sock.

Angie.

Angela.

It wasn’t like you think.

Damn, Angie. Angela. An-ge-la!

I was lifting him out of her.

* * *

For weeks after Dancesca leaves, Clarence Nathan sleeps out in other parts of the city. His hair is short, and he can feel the cold bite at his ears. In Riverside Park he stuffs a red-haired man with his Swiss Army knife. He has seen the man before; he is homeless too. Clarence Nathan is sitting on the park bench by the Hudson, and Redhair taps him on the shoulder—“Spare a cigarette, bud?”—and Clarence Nathan asks him to tap him on the other shoulder for balance. Redhair laughs and reaches forward and steals the lit cigarette from his mouth. The blade is small and pathetic, but it slides in and slides out and Redhair stands there as a small patch of blood spreads on the stomach of his T-shirt. Clarence Nathan runs off and later stabs himself while on a bus. He sees Redhair a few weeks later and Redhair says he is going to kill him, but Clarence Nathan tosses him two packs of cigarettes and that is it; he never sees Redhair again. He wanders around the city in an ache. The sole of his construction boots undoes itself and he sticks it with glue that he steals from a drugstore. One afternoon he sees Cricket in the distance, walking through the park, and he hides in weeds down near the embankment. Junkies and male hookers are in abundance in the park, but they don’t ask him if he wants a blow job anymore; he is broken down and head-hung and dirty and covers his muscled torso with long shirts so he doesn’t have to stare at his scars.

Sometimes there is a mother and child in the park. He moves up quickly behind them and then covers his face and passes them, waits by a lamppost or a park bench, turns around, and sees that it isn’t them.

On an afternoon of torpor he sees a pigeon wing its way through the park; it swoops down toward the bottom of the hill and flies through the ironwork gate, and he wonders if the pigeon lives in the tunnel. He descends the embankment that leads to the gate. Some flowers are in bloom by the crab-apple trees. His feet slide in the muck. The gate is locked. Clarence Nathan gazes at the ironwork and at a bar that is bent backward. He waits a long time for his heart to quiet itself; then he bends his body and nudges his way through the gap. He stands for a long time on the metal platform, like he and his grandfather had once done. All is quiet. The tunnel is high and wide and gracious. Goose bumps on his skin when he descends the steps. He moves into the shadowy depths, across a heap of garbage. He opens a bottle and sips from it and looks up at the ceiling. He gazes along the tunnel and then he feels it: it rises right through him; it is primitive and necessary; and he knows now that he belongs here, that this is his place.

Shuffling along, he sees a dead tree planted in a mound of dirt and he sees murals lit from above. Further up the tunnel, he wonders about the world that is walking above him, all those solitary souls with their banalities and their own peculiar forms of shame. Dancesca is up there. And Lenora. Somewhere, he doesn’t know where. He has tried calling Chicago, but the phone gets slammed down. He has even thought of buying a bus ticket, but the ache is too tremendous within him; he can go nowhere except here; he likes it here, this darkness. He steps on a rail and can feel a slight rumble in his foot, and a few seconds later there is a train with its horn blasting and he steps aside to watch it pass and all the commuters are at their windows unaware and then the train is gone and all that is left is the imprint of its red lights on his eyes and he goes over to the wall and he lies beneath a mural of Salvador Dali’s Melting Clock and he has no idea what time it is.

He looks up through the ceiling grill, watching as the light leaves the sky. He runs his hands over his body and then punches a fist into the tunnel wall and does it again, and each time he can feel a crack in his hands. He keeps on thumping until there is blood on both fists and then he mixes the blood together and keeps on thumping until he is exhausted — he even slaps at it with his elbows — and then he stumbles into the blackest blackness and there is not a sound in the tunnel.

Clarence Nathan can feel the pain in his hands but he doesn’t care; he wishes he could murder them, annihilate them, suicide them; they form no meaningful connection to his wrists — more than anything he wants to get rid of his hands.

Returning to where he saw the pigeon flying, the cantankerous dark all around him, he bumps into a pillar. With all his remembered gymnastics, he climbs the pillar and finds himself on a narrow catwalk and walks along it, welcoming the pain in his hands — he doesn’t even feel it anymore, it is part of him, organic — and he is high up in the tunnel, all spectacular balance still in him; there is no sign of anything or anyone, it is cold and quiet and otherworldly, and he is amazed to find that the walkway leads to an elevated room, and he opens his hands to the dark room and falls there and curls up into himself and he doesn’t sleep.

* * *

The thing about it is, Angie, a man needs time to bury his hands. You listening? I could go bury my hand right here if I wanted to. Just watch me. See how it disappears. Right down here in the sand. Both of them. Angie. Angela. Where the goddamn hell you gone, anyway? Angie? See how they disappear.