Mao II (21 page)

She’d entrusted her home, her work, her wine and her cat to a ghost girl.

The child at the end of the row raised the shade and she was thinking that she didn’t want to look at the magazine in front of her because she might see something from her life in there. She was strapped in, sealed, five miles aloft, and the world was so intimate that she was everywhere in it.

 

 

He stepped off the curbstone and took about seven strides and when he heard the car braking he had time to take one step in reverse and turn his head. He saw worry beads dangling from the rearview mirror of a car coming the other way and then the first car hit him. He walked sideways in a burlesque quickstep, arms pumping, and went down hard, striking his left shoulder and the side of his face. He tried to get up almost at once. People came to help him, a small crowd collecting. Already there was a clamor of blowing horns. He got to his knees, feeling stupid, holding up a hand in reassurance. Someone lifted him under the shoulder and he stood up nodding. He dusted off his clothes, feeling his left hand burn but refusing to look just yet. He smiled tightly at the faces, watching them recede. Then he turned and went back to the sidewalk and looked for a place to sit. People walked around him and the sun beat down. He closed his eyes and faced up into it. Traffic was moving now but in the distance they still leaned on their horns, raising a wail, a lingering midday awe. The sun was a mercy on his face.

There was something at stake in these sentences he wrote about the basement room. They held a pause, an anxious space he began to recognize. There’s a danger in a sentence when it comes out right, a sense that these words almost did not make it to the page. He forgot to shave or leave his clothes in the laundry bag for the maid or he left his clothes but did not fill out the itemized slip. He came back to the room and looked at his clothes in the plastic bag and wondered whether they were clean or dirty. He took them out and held them to the light and saw bloodstains here and there and put them back in the bag to await the disposition of the maid. The work had a stunned edge, a kind of whiteness. He put antiseptic cream on his scraped hand and took warm baths to ease the scattered aches. Even if he’d remembered to shave, he could have done only half his face. A crescent stain extended from his left eye to his jaw and it was shiny and ripe and looked impressively living. He smoked and wrote, thinking he might never get it right but feeling something familiar, something fallen into jeopardy, a law of language or nature, and he thought he could trace it line by line, the shattery tension, the thing he’d lost in the sand of his endless novel.

He learned how to pronounce the word Metaxa, with the accent on the last syllable, and the harsh taste of the brandy began to make sense.

In London there were doctors nearby when he ate breakfast. Here he had priests buying apples in the market. He went into a church in the Plaka and saw a curious set of metal emblems strung beneath an icon of some armor-clad saint. The objects depicted body parts mainly but there were soldiers and sailors embossed on some of the badges, there were naked babies and Volkswagens, there were houses, cows and donkeys. Bill decided these things were votive tokens. If you had an ear infection or heart trouble you requested supernatural aid by buying a ready-made emblem with a heart on it or an ear or a breast, they had breasts, Bill saw, if you had cancer, and then you simply placed the thing near the appropriate saint. The idea extended to a thousand conditions or calamities that might strike your loved ones or your possessions and it made good sense in principle, it made your appeal specific and dynamic, it inspired a democracy of icons, but he thought he might like to go into a shop and buy a token for the whole man and hang it near the appropriate saint. They had saints for everything from smallpox to animal attacks but he doubted there was a patron of the whole man, body, soul and self, and he also had a peculiar twinge deep in his right side, a pang he liked to call it, that he doubted they’d found a saint for, or designed a medal he might buy in a store.

George said, “We have to see a doctor, don’t we?”

“It’s all right.”

“But your face. Don’t we have to see a doctor for this? Let me call.”

“It’s healing normally. Gets better every day.”

“Did you get the driver’s name?”

“I don’t want his name.”

“He hit you, Bill.”

“It wasn’t his fault.”

“Let me call someone. You should report this. Don’t we have to talk to someone for a thing like this?”

“Get me a drink, George.”

They talked into early evening. Then they sat on the terrace watching the streetlights come on, a thousand cars a minute racing toward the gulf in tailing red streamers, the mortal sadness of an ordinary dusk. George’s daughter came out and slouched against the rail, an unhappy girl in jeans.

“I worry about you, Bill.”

“Do me a favor. Don’t.”

“Why have you involved yourself in this?”

“It was your idea.”

“But you’ve come along so readily.”

“True enough.”

“Let me call someone for your face. Jasmine, get the little book with the phone numbers.”

“It’s late. I’ll see a doctor in the morning.”

“This is a promise,” George said.

“Yes. ”

“And it won’t be in Beirut. The airport is closed again due to heavy fighting. I’ve been in touch with Rashid. He could arrange to get out by boat and then fly here from Cyprus but now sea travel is also very dangerous and I don’t think he wants to come here anyway. This is deeply disappointing. I was looking forward to working with you on this.”

“And Jean-Claude?”

“Who is that?”

“That’s the hostage, George.”

“Don’t tell me his name.”

“You know his name.”

“Slipped my mind. Forgotten. Gone forever.”

The girl stood behind her father, hands on his shoulders, softly, miserably massaging.

“How will they kill him?”

“Go home, Bill, and do your work. I enjoy these talks but there’s no longer any reason for you to be here. And think about what I told you. A word processor. The keyboard action is effortless. I promise you. This is something you dearly need.”

He went to his room and tried to get some sleep. There was a line he kept repeating to himself that had the mystery and power he’d felt nowhere else but in the shared past of people who had loved each other, who lived so close they’d memorized each other’s warts and cowlicks and addled pauses, so the line was not one voice but several and it spoke a more or less nonsensical theme, it was a line for any occasion or none at all, mainly meant to be funny but useful also in grim times to remind them that words stick even as lives fly apart.

Measure your head before ordering.

It was the line that says everything. All the more appropriate and all the funnier because outsiders did not understand and all the better finally because there was nothing to understand.

At six in the morning he was walking the streets, checked out, hobbling. Every ten paces he looked back for a taxi. He had this one pair of pants he’d been wearing since New York and it was smeared at the knees with blood from his scraped hand and he still had Charlie’s tight old tweed jacket and Lizzie’s overnight bag and the razor he’d bought in Boston, although he wasn’t using it, and the shoes he’d bought the day before the razor, finally broken in.

He was in a residential area now, completely lost. A man in an undershirt dragged three garbage bags across the street. A clean light soaked into the shaggy bark of a eucalyptus and it was a powerful thing to see, the whole tree glowed, it showed electric and intense, the branches ran to soft fire, the tree seemed revealed. The man dumped the bags at the corner and came back across the street and Bill nodded to him and walked on, hearing a garbage truck work up the hill.

He kept looking back for a taxi.

S
he carried many voices through New York. She talked to people in the park, telling them about a man from far away who had the power to alter history. The networks of inhabited boxes became elaborate. The nights were warm and people were drawn to the park from places all around. They were textured with soot. A woman carried her things in a cluster of plastic bags, the neck of one bag tied to the neck of another and the woman in full trudge dragging the bags behind her with a trusty length of twine. Karen saw how pigeons and squirrels took on ratlike qualities. You saw them go right into tents after food. The pigeons were permanently afoot and the squirrels crouched and bobbed and waited, going boldly into paper bags left standing at the feet of people on the benches. The original rats arrived with night, silent and gliding.

People come out of houses, gather in dusty squares and go together, streams of people calling out a word or name, marching to some central place where they join many others, chanting.

There was Omar in his dope-dealing crouch. A couple of times he helped her carry bottles to the store so she could redeem them. Once they went to an art gallery and stood looking at a large construction that meandered along a wall. She counted metal, burlap, glass, there was clotted paint on the glass, a ledge of weathered wood, there were flashlight batteries and postcards of Greece. Karen looked at a food-crusted spoon that was stuck to the burlap. She thought she might like to touch it, just to touch, for the sake of putting a hand to something that is one of a kind. So she reached over and touched it, then checked around to see if anyone looked askance. On a further whim she lifted slightly. The spoon came off the burlap with a Velcro swish. She was stunned to learn it was detachable. She looked at Omar with her mouth fixed in that slight protrusion and her eyes large and serious. He did a face of exaggerated awe, walking back and forth. In other words a series of open-mouth antics with a strutting component. She held the spoon in her hand, standing totally frozen. She didn’t know when she’d been so scared. The thing came right off the painting. A real spoon with impacted food that was also real. She tried to smell the food, careful not to move the spoon too quickly and cause further horrible dislodgement. Omar strutted toward the door like a trombonist at a funeral, making the actual motions. She didn’t think the spoon would restick to the burlap and there was no place nearby to set it down. The room was totally bared down, walls, floor and artworks. She decided to follow Omar with the spoon held openly so someone could spot it and she could then return it with a muttered apology, which she envisioned completely, setting the spoon carefully on the desk near the door. But no one said anything and then she was out on the street and it was still in her hand, complete with crusted food, and she was even more frightened than before. She’d left the premises with part of an artwork in her possession. Omar strutted and gleamed. She watched him gait away down the street past mannequins in black kimonos with elbows jutting.

There were gas-main ruptures and fireballs outside famous restaurants and people kept saying, “Beirut, Beirut, it’s just like Beirut.”

Near the park she went past the beggar who says, “Spare a little change, still love you.” Every time she passed he was doing his daylong refrain. People went by. Still love you. They went by. Still love you. Spare a little change. They went by. Still love you. She left empty bottles and soda cans at the openings of lean-tos and took other bottles to be redeemed, buying food for the squatters in the park and telling them there was a man from far away. Omar took her into tenements where he did his swift business in figures of speech she never quite caught on to. There were tile floors in the hallway and they had these punctures in the door where they put in locks and took out locks. It was a civilization of locks. A pointing hand painted on an alley wall seemed to lead nowhere.

In the loft she went through many books of photographs, amazed at the suffering she found. Famine, fire, riot, war. These were the never-ceasing subjects, the pictures she couldn’t stop looking at. She looked at the pictures, read the captions, looked at the pictures again, rebels with hoods, executed men, prisoners with potato sacks on their heads. She looked at the limbs of Africans starving. The hungry were everywhere, women leading naked children in a dust storm, the way their long robes billowed. She read the caption and then looked at the picture again. The picture was bare without the words, alone in open space. Some nights she came into the loft and went straight to the pictures. Delirious crowds swirling beneath enormous photographs of holy men. She might study the same picture seven times in seven nights, children falling from a burning tenement, and read the caption every time. It was suffering through and through. It was who is dying in the jungle rot. The words helped her locate the pictures. She needed the captions to fill the space. The pictures could overwhelm her without the little lines of type.

She talked to Israelis and Bangladeshis. A man with sparkly eyes turned halfway in his seat, driving breakneck downtown, and she formed a picture of the taxi in a steep careen, shooting still-life flames. She talked to all the drivers, asking questions in the cash slot.

They went by. Still love you. Went by. Still love you.

There was a dialect of the eye. She read the signs and sayings near the park. The Polish bars, the Turkish baths, Hebrew on the windows, Russian in the headlines, there were painted names and skulls. Everything she saw was some kind of vernacular, bathtubs in kitchens and old Waterman stoves, the liquor-store shelves enclosed in bulletproof plastic like some see-through museum of bottles. She kept seeing the words Sendero Luminoso on half-demolished walls and boarded storefronts. Sendero Luminoso on the cinder-block windows of abandoned tenements. Beautiful-looking words. They were painted over theater posters and broadsheets on all the peeling brick walls in the area.

“I’m not in too good of a mood,” Omar said.