The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (22 page)

When Arnold awoke the following morning, his head was sweltering and his body was shaking with chills. He reached his hands up to his face and ran his fingers over what felt like a rubberized mask. The Nixon mask! Arnold jolted upright with a start and, as his surroundings came into focus, he realized that he was sitting stark naked in high grass. Someone had moved his body while he was asleep, carried him to the edge of the Great Lawn in Central Park. It was still early morning, he sensed, as the sun hadn’t yet risen over the luxury buildings lining
the avenues. Their roofs, some red tile, some grey slate, glistened in the pristine light. The grass itched on the back of the botanist’s legs. He also felt a cool, mud-like sensation on his chest. All around him the air smelled of pollen and honeysuckle and what must have been a nearby mound of dog shit. That’s when Arnold looked down at his own body and saw the lettering:
TRAITOR
. Printed vertically from his collar bone to his navel. He didn’t need any reflection to recognize that the medium was human faeces and the perpetrator was the Bare-Ass Bandit.

Arnold’s initial panic at being abandoned, at having had his body desecrated, soon gave way to that most primal of all human yearnings—the desire to clean himself. The botanist raised his frame up on his elbows, and a horde of black flies, which had settled on his body as though it were carrion, scattered in surprise. He swatted at the empty air in their wake, as though revenging himself on these pests might in some way undo his debasement. Then he rubbed his skin along the grass like a snake until he’d managed to remove as much of the faeces as was possible without water. This dry bath proved highly imperfect and gobbets of excrement remained entangled in his chest hairs. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t long before the botanist’s efforts gave way to an overwhelming sense of futility. Arnold felt disoriented, possibly feverish. Like a rat that had been spun by its tail for several hours and then left to die. Tears of frustration and self-pity and sheer exhaustion overcame him and soon he was sobbing and shaking. He was
so
unnerved that he lost control of his own bladder, and the stench of his urine mixed with that of the lunatic’s shit. It was a pungent odour, and he fought the urge to vomit. But even throwing up required a certain reserve of energy—and Arnold’s was entirely depleted.

He wasn’t without his faults, he knew. Nobody was.
Had he really caused enough harm to deserve this fate? That’s when he recalled the terror in Ira Taylor’s eyes as the bond trader struggled to free his naked body from the chain-link fence. Then he remembered Spotty Spitford’s voice quavering as the minister strained to reach the lower registers of
We Shall Overcome
. But it was the indelible memory of his own hands around Cassandra’s throat that finally drove him to a horrid realization. Good God! Maybe he
had
caused enough harm to deserve his fate.

Human voices, not too distant, shook Arnold. He understood that this wasn’t an opportune time for reflection or self-assessment. The sun had already risen over the nearby trees, and with each passing moment, a steady stream of early morning dog-walkers and bird-watchers were converging on his escape routes. He knew he needed to get off the Great Lawn and into the woods as rapidly as possible. But how? And where was he to go from there? What he really wanted was a piece of clothing, anything to reduce his feeling of exposure, of helplessness, but now even something as basic as underwear seemed far beyond his grasp. Only hours earlier, he’d have had no qualms about forcibly unburdening passers-by of their jogging shorts, but that entire mind-set suddenly seemed like a distant shadow. What sort of human being attacked strangers for their wardrobes—even under exigent circumstances? Maybe excuses could be made for a true sociopath, like the Bandit. But Arnold recognized that he
wasn’t
a sociopath.
He could offer his own rationalizations, of course—that he’d gotten carried away in the moment, that the world served up many injustices far greater than any he’d created. That was Bonnie Card’s sort of thinking. She’d find a way to justify his behaviour with her ethicist’s abracadabra.

Arnold realized now that he wanted no part of that. Never again. He thought back on all that had happened to him, all that he’d done: the humiliation of Spotty Spitford, the torture of Ira Taylor, his kiss with Cassandra. It all seemed like a bizarre nightmare. Only his own nudity confirmed for him that he’d ever really lived through these events. Somewhere, somehow, he sensed that he had crossed over a barrier—and he wanted more than anything wade his way back over the Rubicon.

Luckily, the Bandit had laid him to rest on a patch of turf along the outskirts of the Great Lawn, a shady nook which hadn’t recently been mowed. The crabgrass was just tall enough for Arnold to slither forward without exposing himself. He kept his belly flat to the ground, his elbows and knees bent outward—like a World War I soldier trying to surprise an enemy trench. He tried to keep his mind blank. He sensed that if he thought too much—about either the horrors that had been done to him or those that he’d perpetrated—he might come entirely unhinged. That was what became of real terrorists, he’d heard. Some, of course, remained intransigent to the end. But others, when confined alone with their own thoughts for a long enough
period of time, degenerated to madness under the weight of their shame. So best not to think. Just crawl. Inch by inch. One knee in front of the other. So simple—like a child. But it was only a matter of time before unwelcome ideas crept into the recesses of Arnold’s head. The sounds of pedestrians on the nearby trails propelled his unhealthy thinking. He heard the voice of young woman reasoning with her poodle, as though it were a human being, and he was instantly seized with a memory of Cassandra snuggling against the nape of her beloved Son of a President. And now he would never see the crazy girl or the oddly-named beast again. Because he’d been unable to compromise, unable to forgive. Arnold’s dilemma was that, in his gut, he wasn’t so sure that Cassandra deserved to be forgiven for what she’d done—but, at another level, he missed her intensely. Then he hated himself for missing her, because she wasn’t Judith. And he longed for Judith so deeply that, when he thought about it, that his feelings for the girl seemed entirely trivial. The more Arnold tried to decipher his own emotions,
or what they should be
, the less they made sense. All internal debate, at some level, was like reasoning with a dog.

Arnold was certain of only one thing: He was running short on options. Having been cast out both by society and by its rejects, each time as a result of his own pigheaded intransigence, he no longer had any safe harbour to claim as his own. It was true that he didn’t
love America. The idea of loving a country still seemed ludicrous to him. But he
did
love the idea of having a place to go—a place to call home—and if that meant allying himself with a country, in a pact of mutual convenience, it was a step he was more than willing to take. Better than living as a refugee, alone and hunted. Or trusting himself to the enemies of his country. That was one lesson he’d learned from the Bandit: The enemy of his enemy was
not
his friend. As he crawled across the tall grass, trying to conjure up his next move, he realized how wrong he’d been to envy the poor lunatic. Arnold’s stupefaction gave way to a sense of revulsion—not so much horror at what the Bandit had done, as awful as it was, but horror at the unfortunate creature’s existence. Even prison seemed more appealing, all of a sudden, than that sort of isolation.

Arnold arrived at the edge of the grass, opposite a poorly maintained footpath. A homeless couple was arguing under a disease-ridden spruce, threatening each other with all sorts of hyperbolic physical injuries, but they were too engrossed in their own altercation to notice the naked man as he darted into a nearby hedge of privet. Arnold collapsed in the thicket, catching his breath while he listened to them shout. It was impossible to pick up the origins of their row—or even its purpose—but it left Arnold feeling even more empty than before. He’d been a fool to fight with Judith. Ever. It wasn’t as though apologizing or adopting a few children was the end of the world. What
Arnold wanted now, more than anything, was his old life back: His playful arguments with Willie Zambrano and his bitter ones with Ira Taylor; his back-breaking morning weeding sessions; even Judith’s unforgiving lectures when he tracked up the carpets in his gardening shoes. Ordinary life was what he longed for more than anything. That, and his wife. To wake up in the morning to find she’d stolen all of his blankets and pillows—“appropriated,” she called it—and to love her all the more. To sit at the kitchen table while she mocked the results of his stab at the Monday morning crossword puzzle. To have someone to whom he didn’t have to explain anything—because she knew what he was thinking before he thought it, and what he was going to do before he did it. There was nothing better in life than sharing it with someone who loved you no matter how much of an ass you made of yourself—who would forgive you even if you didn’t deserve to be forgiven. Judith was certainly that person. But Judith was one hundred blocks away in a townhouse surrounded by police barricades and self-proclaimed patriots with far too much time on their hands. Even if he could find a way home—and you couldn’t just crawl across Manhattan stark naked—he had no way of getting inside.

Soon the homeless couple reconciled and wandered off hand-in-hand. Arnold used the privet leaves as makeshift tissues to scrub more of the excrement from his chest hairs. Then he continued north toward the reservoir.
His first thought had been that he might wait until dark and then dunk himself into the water for a quick rinse. It wouldn’t exactly be a bubble bath—the pond was covered with a thick layer of scum—but baptism by stagnant water was preferable to the stink of human waste. Unfortunately, when Arnold arrived at the southern shore, he discovered that a high mesh fence had been erected around the entire man-made lake to accommodate a drainage project. The one advantage of this renovation—was that a small section of the park had been cordoned off from pedestrians as a workstation. It appeared unoccupied. Arnold darted around a parapet of sandbags and hid alongside the rear wall of the boathouse. It crossed his mind that he could empty the sand out of the sacks and fashion the canvas into a makeshift wardrobe. Like a scarecrow’s outfit. But he had nothing with which to cut into the heavy,
tightly-woven
cloth. The work crew had taken their tools with them, leaving behind only wrappers and duct tape. Arnold was still attempting to tear open one of the bags when two Parks Department maintenance employees rounded the corner of the shuttered snack bar in a golf cart. The botanist abandoned his refuge and dashed into a raspberry hedge. He was sure the men had spotted him—that they’d chase him into the brush. But the cart drove on, its occupants rehashing the previous night’s Yankees game.

Arnold’s failure with the sandbags enforced his desire for clothing. He crept through the raspberry bushes
to the opposite side of the boathouse, where several large metal dumpsters stood brimming over with trash, and he set about combing the refuse for discarded garments. All he managed to do was to slash his palm on a broken bottle. A few minutes later, he was still perched atop the garbage bin when he heard a trio of joggers debating whether they might ignore the construction barriers. Their approach forced him to plunge again into the undergrowth—this time head-first into a thicket of briars. The branches tore at his bare flesh. His bare arms and chest stung. It was impossible to tell where the blood stopped and the faeces began. He picked the thorns out of his flesh one-
by-one
. In a moment of weakness, Arnold even considered throwing himself on the mercies of the passing joggers.

All that separated Arnold from surrender was inertia. And possibly his nudity—because the thought of exposing himself to total strangers seemed suddenly and inexplicably humiliating. But he had no home, no prospect of security, no hope of seeing his wife again. He didn’t even have any cigarettes—the Bandit had stolen them along with his pants. If he’d still had the revolver, he’d have shot himself. Unfortunately, the lunatic had taken that too. And Arnold’s sneakers. His feet, already torn up from his hike to Spitford’s, stung with every step.

Arnold took a deep breath and stepped out into the open—determined to beg the next passer-by for assistance. But the joggers had already disappeared over a rise and the
footpath remained momentarily quiet. The one time he
wanted
to be caught, he managed to find himself all alone. If there were a God and that God were going to show him mercy, Arnold pleaded, it was now or never. That was when he spotted an abandoned pair of men’s undershorts lying on the concrete beside the boathouse bathrooms. The briefs were crumpled into a ball beneath a dripping spigot, sopping in a pool of icy water. On closer inspection, they also proved to be smaller than Arnold had hoped. But they were better than nothing. He stretched the fabric several times, as best he could, and then inched the frigid cotton up his legs and over his groin.

For a moment, finding the wet underpants seemed like a great victory to Arnold. But that was merely a reflection of the abject state to which he had been reduced. When the euphoria wore off and he saw things more clearly, he realized how hopeless his situation was. Even surrendering seemed pointless. All he wanted now was to see Judith one more time—to apologize for what he’d put her through—and then he’d be willing to accept whatever additional tortures that fate chose to throw his way. But with the police cordon and Spitford’s army of demonstrators, even that brief solace appeared denied to him. He found himself missing the Bandit—wishing he might ask the lunatic for advice. Because the poor lunatic’s existence might be unfortunate, but he
was
resourceful. That was another thing Arnold had learned about himself:
He
wasn’t
resourceful. On his own, he wasn’t much good for anything.

Then the kernel of an idea congealed in his mind. It was implausible, maybe a one-in-a-million. Within minutes, his mood raced from dejected to joyous. With a sudden burst of determination, he navigated through the park—from hedge to hedge—until he arrived at the security headquarters, a long rectangular building with faux gas lanterns hanging from the eaves and a roof shaped like a pagoda’s. Sure enough, there were a pair of recreation department police cars idling at the curb side. Arnold darted out from the brush and exchanged the transponders. Then he pulled onto the gravel road and steered his way toward Fifth Avenue. Soon he was heading south, toward home. They’d catch up with him, he knew, but he at least might have an hour or so of cushion while they figured out what he’d done. Maybe longer. He doubted the police stashed their most astute investigators on parks’ patrol.

Arnold abandoned the cruiser in front of the sex toy museum and scaled the chain-link fence designed to keep vagrants out of the adjacent lot. His back and hands were still bleeding, and he left a trail of blood along the dust. It took him half an hour to uncover the entrance to the Weatherman’s tunnel, now overgrown with clover, and another spell of hard labour to dislodge the storm grating. Then he crept into the underground passageway and lugged out the cinderblocks one by one like a miner.
Each brick felt as though he were carrying an entire city on his bare, bloody back.