The Shooting (9 page)

—Maybe so, but I did not deserve it.

—And yet you still got it.

—Maybe so. But if that young man were to come to me now I would sit him down and chew him out until he saw how he was wasting his life. I started in medicine ten years behind my generation. I could have been a surgeon, I could have been a chief. But look, here I am instead, stuck in this dingy office draining pustules and fondling scrota and putting up with immigrant pimps trying to con me. Look at him now, what's he doing?

The former doctor is lowering himself to his knees. He has given landmark lectures to large theaters filled with thousands of doctors just like this one, each hanging rapt on his every word. He has mentored them, hired them, corrected them, improved them, supervised them, and, at times, fired them. He has fired dozens of doctors just like this one. A year ago, doctors like this came to him for advice, they groveled in his doorway and begged him for favors the way he begs now. —Please, he says in the language, humble and soft. The floor is cold and hard on his knees, and he is humiliated and he hates this doctor. —Please help me. Please.

The doctor shakes his head, exasperated. Now the former doctor is crawling across the floor on his hands and knees. Every cell in his being recoils but he still proceeds. The doctor flinches as the former doctor takes his hands in his own, begs. —Please.
Please.

The doctor pulls his hands away. —Now that's enough of this nonsense. Leave at once before I call the police.

The nurse helps him to his feet and walks him out, holding him by the arm.

—Close the door behind you, the doctor says after them.

He visits every other doctor in the city. Every single one. None will do what he is asking them to do. It is against the law. There are, of course, disgraced physicians at the free clinic who could be convinced, but they are the types who could be convinced to do anything for money; he would never send her into a room with one of them. In learning how to ask them to do what he needs them to do, he picks up even more words and phrases in the language, becomes more conversant, which leads to more maintenance work beyond the shelter as does meeting sympathetic patients in waiting rooms overhearing him plead. Gets good contracts, becomes very busy. Develops a reputation as dependable, wizardly. Building owners fight over his services. He is making enough money to move himself and his wife into an apartment in one of the immigrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. He thinks they could afford one with two bedrooms.

She is swollen and nauseated and depressed, cannot get out of bed. —Do something, she moans from the cot.

He says, —I'm trying.

—No, you're not, you're working, you're getting comfortable here, you're preparing for the baby, you want me to have the baby.

—I'm not, he says, not sure whether he is lying.

—You want me to have the baby and you want to stay here and raise it here.

—No, he says. He tries to think of more to say but only repeats, —No. Anyway we cannot stay here even if we wanted. Soon they will make us leave.

One night he finds a coat hanger among her things. —Please don't, please don't do that.

—If I have to I will, she says, —the clock is ticking and you're doing nothing.

—I am working on it. We'll find a way.

—How?

—I don't know. He kisses her damp head.

She says, —What do you think it looks like?

He says, —I don't think about it and neither should you.

—I can't help it, she says, —whenever I close my eyes I see it. She closes them. —There it is. The little demon. Hello, you ugly little disease. You are hairy like a chimp. Shit is smeared all over your mangy fur. One eye half closed, the other glassy and peering off sideways. You drool. Snot drips down your face. You've chewed through your own umbilical cord like a rat and suck my blood through it like a straw, that is how you feed. You feed insatiably. You shit and shit because you feed and feed. And then my whole womb is flooded with it. Instead of amniotic fluid you float and soak in your own shit. In your heart is only hate. You seethe and rip at the walls of my womb, you're so eager to get out and begin your wicked life of raping and ruining, just like your father. I see it all the time, I do not even have to close my eyes. And do you want to see what I do sometimes to help us?

She strikes at her belly with her fist.

—I do this.

She punches herself again. Before she can do it again he catches her wrist.

—You will have to do it, she says looking up at him holding her wrist.

He does not answer. He knows she is right.

—You know how, don't you? You've done it before?

—No, never.

—But you know how?

—Yes. I think so.

—How is it done?

—I won't tell you that. What matters is that it will be done.

—You will do it?

—It is either me or you, right?

—Right.

—Then, yes, I will do it.

He sets up in a secluded storage room in the basement. It is damp and dark and its door is kept chained shut; there are no security
cameras, no one ever goes in. He has arranged several bright lamps. He searched for a proper table, but finding none he had to scrub the concrete floor with bleach and lay down plastic sheeting. He has bought gauze and rubber gloves and a surgical mask and gowns and antiseptics and a speculum and forceps and a thirty-centimeter-long sewing needle that he has sterilized. A plastic bucket sits empty. He scrubs his hands in the sink in the corner. She is lying on her back, silent. Her hands rest on her belly. He turns off the faucets using his elbows, comes over to her, clean hands dripping, holding the needle. Kneels before her as though in prayer. Spreads her knees apart. Her skin is so cold. In his other hand he holds a flashlight, shines it on her. He feels sick. Her belly rises and falls, rises and falls, its rhythm increasing.

—I love you, he says.

—I love you, she says.

She puts her forearm over her eyes, bares her broken teeth, grimacing. He begins to slip the needle in. Before he can, she sits up screaming. He drops the needle and the flashlight, holds her.

—What is it, are you hurt?

She is sobbing. —I lied before, she says, —I do not see a demon when I close my eyes. I see a boy, I see a little baby boy, I see our son.

She is walking down the street one afternoon when she becomes faint with hunger. Steps inside the first place she comes to, a pizza shop. The line moves slowly, she is getting more hungry, more light-headed; her face is icy, it is dire that she sit or she will faint. No empty seats. Lunchtime rush. Just in time a man notices her and stands to offer his seat, helps her into it. She takes it, feels much better, thanks him. He looks familiar. A little old man.

She says, —Where do I know you from?

He says, —I don't know if we've met.

—You look so familiar, do I look familiar to you at all?

—No, but tell me where you're from. She tells him. He says, —I've been there, it is beautiful, but a shame what has become of it.

She says, —Why were you there?

He says, —I was on a fellowship at a university.

—That is where I know you from. I was faculty there. We never met but I remember your lectures.

—Well! Of all the pizza places in all the cities in the world!

She tells him everything that has happened.

He is horrified, says, —Let me help you.

—How?

—Well, let me make some calls and we shall see.

He and his wife live nearby, they invite them for dinner. Martin and Monica are their names. Over dessert, Martin clears his throat and says, —I cannot tell you how moved I am by your plight. Monica has a cousin in New Jersey. He has agreed to sponsor you. We are working now to get you the documents you need. Once they come through, congratulations—you are going to America.

On the way home to the shelter after dinner, still stunned, giddy, he says to her, —You would never have met them if we had gone through with it.

She says, —Isn't it interesting? Everything is so beautiful.

He says, —I had forgotten, but yes, it is.

The papers come through. They are official, bearing all the right stamps and seals and watermarks. They take a taxi to the airport, board a plane, and suddenly they are standing in the United States. New Jersey is vast and new and clean. Monica's cousin is humorless and overbearing and expects them to go with him to a Christian church. Soon he resents them always being on his couch, the former doctor rubbing his wife's feet and feeding her macaroni and cheese, laughing, feeling their baby move in her belly.

The former doctor finds work as a porter for a nearby residential building. He does not want to become a doctor again. Now he is a handyman. In the blue distance from the rooftop he can see the skyline of New York City. That is where he wants to raise his son. Finds a better porter job there, in Manhattan, far uptown and hardly even on the island, but that is fine, and here he is, a New Yorker, married to a grand woman and with a son on the way. He loves walking down the perfect straight avenues passing American after fellow American, listening to all their languages, feeling the sun
bouncing off the upper reaches of the gleaming towers down onto him, lighting his way through all that grit and pulp of striving, showing him all the free humanity, all the talent and opportunity and culture of the world distilled here and set loose, the whole spectrum of success and failure, goodness and immorality, beauty and ugliness, hope and despair. New York City, where you see a thousand faces a day yet know nothing about the people they belong to; there is an entire universe behind each one and so you must have faith in all people, you are forced to, the only other choice is to build walls around yourself and live afraid—what a fool is one who decides what is in another man's heart, what a vulgarian is one who ever presumes anything about anyone.

They live in Queens, an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts, an illegal apartment: no electrical outlets, just a power strip stapled to the wall and leading to the apartment downstairs, no windows, no kitchen, they wash their dishes in the bathtub. The handyman makes sure she eats well—farm-fresh fruits and vegetables and premium meats and fish—but to save money he subsists on pasta and jarred tomato sauce. The manager of the building he maintains, Dave, tells him he also manages another building downtown in the West Village, a very high-end building; he needs a live-in superintendent on call around the clock seven days a week, would he be interested? He and she move out of Queens and into their new home, the basement unit of this building, down among its guts, with the trash and the rats and the laundry, exiled from the white people upstairs, but that is okay, it is a beautiful building in the heart of New York City—is there no end to their good fortune?

Their child is born. The handyman weeps when he first holds the swaddled fellow in his arms at the hospital, where one of his building's residents, a surgeon there, has arranged for them a private room. —He's so light, he keeps saying, —he weighs nothing, nothing at all, he's nothing to hold and nothing to be afraid of. Why were we ever afraid of you?

One of the first phrases the handyman learned to say in English upon arrival:
Tell me the story of your life.
He makes his new humble profession—often so exhausting and demeaning and
stultifying—tenable by chatting with the residents as he fixes their toilets and answers their beck and call. They are often unfriendly and unfeeling. Rather than resenting them he tries to see them as people who have experienced things he never has, who in pursuit of their success have known ups and downs, gains and losses, heartbreaks, humiliations, as he has, for everyone has, it is what we have in common with each other, and he likes to say to them as he sweats and grinds for them,
Tell me the story of your life
, then listens to them tell it and tries to feel it the way they have felt. Quickly he becomes respected and loved. They wave to him when they see him out on the street, invite him and his family to dinner, to parties, help him get loans and write him letters of recommendation.

When the new parents bring home their son the residents come through in a steady line, bearing gifts for the baby—a partner at the world's biggest law firm on floor six bearing a wardrobe of one-of-a-kind Hermès onesies, the Oscar-winning actor on sixteen bearing a custom-crafted crib made from two-hundred-year-old Bolivian wood—and Hector at the hardware store on the corner bearing diapers, other supers on the block bearing bottles and a high chair and a changing table, the owner of the drag queen bar one street over bearing a diaper pail—the entire city seems to want to meet the boy, help raise the son of the handyman they have come to love. The families of both the handyman and his wife are unreachable in that dark bloody world they have left so far behind, but the son nonetheless has a family. The handyman has nothing to one day pass on to him and probably never will—no money, no land, no pictures of relatives and ancestors, not even his own genes. All he can leave his son is his example.

They name him Clayton. Saw the name in the newspaper and liked it. The sleepwalking begins at age seven. No hardware is enough to keep him inside—he can undo any lock. It's as if, his wife says, he is trying to escape them. The handyman tries to mention it to the new residents after they move in. His wife makes traditional food from their home country, they bring it to them, welcome them, tell them about the building and Clayton's sleepwalking, tell them if it ever happens to not be afraid, simply call and he will come help Clayton
back downstairs. Once an older woman, a cosmetic industry scion, forgot to lock her door and Clayton was able to enter her apartment. She found him in the morning curled on her sofa. She was forgiving, but the handyman was terrified of being fired and installed an alarm on his unit's front door. After three years without another episode, the batteries on the alarm ran out and the handyman never replaced them, and he stopped telling new residents about the sleepwalking.