The Intruder (15 page)

“ The patient has a positive attitude and a willingness to adapt.’ “ Baum paces back and forth, reading from the three-ring binder as if it were scripture. “’He’s lucid and able to make decisions.’ Isn’t that what you wrote?”

“Well.. .”

“Yes or no? Is that what you wrote?”

“Yes, but that was before he went out on the street and started getting high again,” Dana blurts out.

Jake has to smile. That’s his girl. Trying to steal home plate while no one’s looking. Baum isn’t having any of it, though.

“I move that the last remark be stricken as nonresponsive,” he says, getting a nod from the judge.

He turns his back to Dana, giving her his hard-boiled side. “Isn’t it true, Ms. Schiff, that in your experience with Mr. Gates he responds well to the drug called Haldol?”

“He seems to function well when he’s taking his Haldol, but when he stops taking it and starts smoking crack, he shows signs of psychosis.”

“Are you qualified to give that diagnosis?”

“No, but. . .”

Jake finds himself staring at the back of Hamilton’s head. Stand up, you asshole. Object. Can’t you see my wife’s being attacked? But Hamilton remains stubbornly seated. Probably too busy thinking about the grosses of his father’s last movie.

“In fact, did you make any attempt to ascertain the source of my client’s problems?” Baum asks with a slight Queens accent. “Were you even aware that he’d recently suffered the loss of his wife and his child?”

Jake’s stomach feels caught up in thorns and string. He wants to help Dana, but he’s powerless here in the spectator’s seat. It’s as if she’s trapped behind a wall of thick glass and he can’t get to her.

“I was aware of his loss,” Dana says, balancing her words as precariously as books on her head. “But I never really had a chance to talk to him about it.”

“I see,” Baum says, with a twitch of sarcasm. “You don’t know much about my client, do you, Ms. Schiff?”

“Im aware that he needs to be hospitalized.”

Baum smiles thinly and swings back to the defense table, dropping one file and picking up another. He pauses to put a hand on John G.’s back, but Gates doesn’t move. He just sits there with his head bowed in abject sorrow. For a fleeting moment, Jake catches a glimpse of the human being beneath all the raving and screaming. He wonders how he could have felt threatened by this shabby diminished little man.

In the meantime, Baum is making another run at Dana. “Are you aware, Ms. Schiff, that a staff psychiatrist who’s interviewed Mr. Gates within the last twelve hours found that he’s not an imminent danger to himself?”

“He hasn’t seen Mr. Gates when he’s high,” Dana shoots back.

“That’s not the question.” The judge wags a gnarled finger at her. “Mr. Baum asked if he was an ‘imminent’ danger. We’re not talking about what he might do tomorrow or the next day. We’re talking about how he is right now.”

Dana looks over at Gates slumped down in his seat. Then she stares out at Jake, but he can’t think of any way to signal her. “I guess he’s all right at this particular moment.”

Baum starts to ask another question, but the judge is on a roll. “Young lady,” he says. “Let me give you a little history lesson.”

He’s been waiting all afternoon to give someone a lecture. And in Dana, he has a captive audience.

“Back when I was a young prosecutor, before the Civil War”—he flashes a roguish smile—“I had occasion to investigate some of the more infamous mental hospitals in our area. I saw people forced to wallow in their own excrement and a man chained down naked, being force-fed through a tube. Such things did happen! But thanks to miraculous drugs, we no longer have to keep these unfortunate individuals in these filthy hellholes. We can return people to their communities.”

It really is true, Jake thinks. In most jobs, they make you retire once you get too old and stupid to function. Whereas that can be your beginning as a judge.

“No further questions,” says Baum.

Dana steps down, looking dizzy. The judge takes a few minutes to review his papers and confer with his clerk. In the meantime,
doctors, lawyers, and patients involved in the next few cases file into the back of the courtroom. Jake spends a few seconds trying to tell them apart.

“I must say, Mr. Baum,” the judge says, finally clearing his throat. “I’m in complete agreement that there would be no point in keeping your client in the hospital against his will.”

A phone rings twice in the background and then stops. DeLeon looks disappointed about missing the call. “As far as his current activity on the street is concerned, I’d remind Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Schiff that most of the old loitering laws have been thrown out recently, except where they apply toward drug dealers and prostitutes soliciting business.”

Of course, as half the New York bar knows, the judge roams the West Side Highway like a Texas ranger on Friday nights, searching for working girls in his Lincoln Town Car.

“I’m going to ask that your client stay away from the Schiffs and start taking his medication,” the judge tells Baum. “I leave it to Mr. Gates and his doctors to work out whether he wants to stay on at the hospital.”

“Then he’ll get out right away,” Hamilton Jr. protests.

A Criminal Court judge has already given Gates time served on the vandalism and resisting arrest charges.

“Then so be it,” says the judge. “I’m suggesting Mr. Gates find himself a treatment program within the next thirty days. Otherwise, you’ll be back before me, Mr. Baum, and I won’t be so lenient.”

The gavel comes down. Baum offers his hand, but John G. doesn’t shake it. He just looks dazed, as if he hasn’t been present for most of the hearing.

Dana comes over looking forlorn and Jake hugs her. He’s furious with himself. It’s not losing an argument before a judge. It’s the feeling that he’s let his family down at his chosen profession.

“Let’s get outta here,” he says. “This place is starting to depress me.”

21

You know,” says Dana, “the whole time we were in court today I was thinking about—”

“Connecticut.” Jake finishes the thought.

The Schiffs are making their way down Broadway after dinner. It’s the kind of languorous summer night that slows the step, makes the air stand still, and engulfs the lit buildings in a buttery haze. Even the long-legged high school girls seem to drift instead of zip by on their Rollerblades. In the distance, the old Ansonia Hotel looks like a cloud made of concrete.

“We’d probably lose a third of our investment in the house,” she says in a tense voice. “I’m not blind to that. But we’d still be able to afford a place in Westchester or Connecticut. Maybe not Scarsdale or Greenwich. But Tarrytown, for sure. I looked in the
Times.
They were selling an imitation colonial for four-fifty ...”

“Dana. . .”

“You could still practice here and we could live somewhere else.”

Alex begins to slouch, as if he’s trying to shove his entire upper body into his pants pockets.

“Dana . . .“Jake starts shaking his head. “Dana, will you listen to me for one second?”

“What?”

“Look over there,” he says. He points to a run-down old coffee
shop across the street that’s somehow held its ground between the lacy boutiques and pretentious condominiums. “You know who works behind the counter?”

“No, I don’t.”

“The ex-president of Liberia.”

“I thought they ate the ex-president.”

“That was the other one. I’m talking about the guy before him. I helped him get his green card. On his employment application, he put down, ‘Former sovereign ruler of developing African nation. Commanded army of three thousand.’ ”

“No way,” says Alex.

“It’s true.” Jake turns toward a Korean deli on the far corner. “I met the guy who owns that place twelve years ago, when he was sitting on a milk crate outside snapping green beans for the salad bar. Now he just bought an apartment house in Queens and he’s got half his family from Seoul living over there.”

“So?” says Dana.

“So that’s the Ansonia,” says Jake, as the old hotel’s rococo facade comes into focus. “That’s where Saul Bellow wrote
Seize the Day.
Stravinsky and Flo Ziegfeld lived there too. Before your time, Alex, they had Plato’s Retreat in the cellar.”

“What’s Plato’s Retreat?”

“It’s where I met your mother.”

“It’s not.” Dana draws back her fist. “So what’s your point, Jake?”

“My point is, this is still the greatest city in the world. This is where we raised our son. And I’m not going to let some screwball stampede me off the reservation.”

“Can we get some ice cream?” asks Alex, as Dana starts to sigh in exasperation.

They stop and watch their son bound into the nearest red Háagen-Dazs parlor with the most animation he’s shown all evening. He’s reached the age where his parents are a constant source of bother and humiliation. Again, Jake finds himself wishing there were a second child in the space between them, a little one who would actually enjoy still having his mother and father around.

“You know, I think the city you’re talking about doesn’t exist anymore,” Dana says. “Sometimes I wonder if it ever existed.”

“It existed, all right. And I’ll tell you something else. A hundred years ago, things were just as bad as they are now. They had the Plug Uglies and draft riots. Half the population was squeezed into lower Manhattan and dying of typhus. But you know, no matter what happens, the city always keep going.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if that’s such a good thing.”

“Please help me get something to eat. . . Please help me get something to eat...”

John G. is shaking his cup to a rhythm no one else can hear and chanting the Upper West Side beggar’s mantra.

As soon as he got out of the hospital, he headed right up to this part of town and smoked himself a jumbo. But after a couple of days of being clean, he finds it’s requiring greater and greater quantities to truly get off. Instead of that familiar buzz, he just feels angry.

Angry at the doctors who wanted him to stay at the hospital. Angry at the people who put him away in the first place. The Schiffs. The Shits. And angry at the ice cream customers who won’t give a man a quarter to get high on a nice summer night.

“Please help me get something to eat, you goddamn motherfuckers . . . Please help me ...”

Why should he bother being polite? Now that he’s getting back down in that nasty dank little crack groove, he doesn’t see the point of being nice to anybody.

And then he sees them. It’s almost as if he’d summoned them. The people who tried to put him away. The Shits. The Schiffs. What’s the difference?

“Hey, you motherfuckers!”

The lady grabs her husband’s arm. Their kid walks out of the ice cream parlor holding a vanilla cone. John G. tells himself it can’t be them. It’s his mind playing tricks on him again. But then he remembers they live right around the corner from this place. In the house they stole from him.

At first, Jake can’t believe they’ve run into John G. again so quickly. But then he looks around. A hot summer night with a long line of guilty liberals outside an ice cream parlor on the Upper West Side. Where else would you go if you were a panhandler?

“I said, hey, you motherfuckers!”

Alex comes out with an ice cream cone.

“Gimme some of that, you little motherfucker. I’m hungry.” John G. tries to grab it from him.

All the teenage bravado instantly disappears. The boy huddles by his father’s side.

“What are you afraid of?” says John G. “You’re not in any ‘imminent danger,’ are you?”

“Come on, let’s go.” Jake puts one arm around his wife and one arm around his son and starts walking downtown.

“ ‘Imminent’ means right now.” John G. starts to follow them. “Not tomorrow or yesterday. Right now!”

He knocks over a garbage can on the corner. Jake feels his wife’s shoulder shaking and sees the ice cream cone trembling in his son’s hand.

“Gimme some of that ice cream, you little motherfucker. I’m your father. Do you wanna see your father starve?!”

The Schiff family starts to move more quickly. Past hardware stores, Tex-Mex restaurants, and sidewalk vendors with blankets full of Dumpster goods and antique lamp shades.

“What are you all running for?” John G. shouts as he lurches after them. “Don’t you know what ‘imminent’ means? ‘Imminent’ doesn’t mean I’m gonna kill you right now. ‘Imminent’ means I’m gonna kill you in a minute.”

Finally Alex can’t take it anymore. Perhaps it’s the memory of the box cutter being waved in his face. He drops his ice cream cone and sprints right into the traffic going both ways on Seventy-ninth Street. From the corner of his eye, Jake sees a taxi turning west on Broadway and a pair of headlights coming straight toward his son.

Some primal instinct takes over. He jumps off the sidewalk and comes running at Alex. His heart is banging against his ribs. He
reaches the boy at the yellow center median and pushes him out of the way with both hands.

Alex goes stumbling toward the safety of a bus shelter on the south side of the street. Jake turns, just in time to see a pair of headlights come rushing at him. His body stiffens and his breath freezes. There’s no time to get out of the way. The brakes screech and light moves across the windshield.

But the cab stops less than two feet in front of Jake. He looks down at the scratched yellow hood and breathes a sigh of relief.

And then a bike messenger in purple Lycra shorts and goggles plows into him going the other way.

22

A seagull crying. A motor starting.

John G. forces his eyes open and finds himself on a park bench along the Hudson River promenade. Tall white houseboats float beside old gray docks. Caribbean women with music in their voices push small white babies in well-appointed strollers. A merciless sun stares down hard.

He’s not high anymore. But in his mind, he keeps hearing the screech of brakes from last night and seeing the cab rushing at Mr. Schiff. The lady standing next to him screams and then her voice melds with the one in his head. And when he looks again, the headlights are rushing toward a child.