Twelve (10 page)

Chapter Fifty-Six

WHITE MIKE GETS
on the F train at Fifty-first Street, and all but one seat is taken. He is going downtown, all the way to Coney Island, just to get out. He'll deal with the beeps later. It's still early. White Mike sits in the empty seat, pulling his overcoat tight around his shoulders and making himself small so he fits between the other passengers. At the next stop an old lady with white hair and a blue coat gets on the train carrying a bag and clings to the pole in the middle of the car in front of White Mike.

He has encountered this problem before. He can never decide whether to abdicate his seat to old ladies. What are old ladies doing on the train by themselves, anyway? Old ladies shouldn't have to ride the train by themselves. White Mike sighs and stands up and indicates to the old lady with a cough and a wave of his hand that the seat is hers. She doesn't get it, though he sees the other passengers notice. He taps the old woman on the shoulder and points to the seat, and she nods and smiles and sits down, dragging her bag between
her legs. White Mike moves to the next car down and leans on the doors.

Coney Island is the last stop. A whole hour from where he got on, it is like another country, White Mike thinks, as he leaves the train. The place is all washed out in the gray of winter, and the cold bites even through his overcoat. White Mike walks with his head up because he is looking at the skeletal roller coasters and faded billboards. The place is practically deserted, and White Mike thinks it would be a good place to get kidnapped. It feels like an old part of New York. White Mike read
Ragtime
and liked the description of the decadence and the beach and the children playing and walking the boardwalk. He even recommended the book to Molly. No children now, though, only White Mike and what he perceives to be a transvestite hooker, although he isn't sure. He has seen hookers before, but he doesn't think he has ever seen one so tall or broad. White Mike keeps walking until he comes to the arcade on the board-walk. He can hear the chirping electronics of virtual explosions and the roll of Skee-Balls over their wooden tracks. He walks in.

In a dark corner, there is a larger game with a big sensor pad in front of it that a short Latino kid in a tank top and parachute pants is standing on. His parka lies on the floor off to the side. The game is called Dance Dance Revolution, and White Mike watches as it counts down from three and starts. It plays music, a really fast techno samba with a driving beat, and arrows
scroll up the screen. The kid on the pad is moving his feet where the arrows point, on beat with the music. The song is too fast, though, and he is missing the beats or stepping in the wrong direction; every time he screws up, the game beeps and the kid starts laughing. But his friends aren't laughing, and soon the kid stops. White Mike is watching discreetly a little ways away. The kid on the pad gets off, throwing his arms up at the fast music. He grabs his jacket and steps to the side. Pretty soon his turn runs out, and the machine requests another seventy-five cents. A taller black kid in a dark knit hat stands on the pad and puts in the money. He takes off his jacket and drops it on the floor. The kid is big, and his black sweatshirt is stretched a little over his shoulders. He looks strong. There is a cross hanging around his neck on a gold chain, and White Mike can't tell whether the stones on the cross are real, but he bets they are not.

The music comes on again, and the beat is even faster than before. The kid starts moving his feet, and it doesn't look anything like dancing. But the rhythm starts speeding up, and he isn't missing any of the beats and the machine hasn't beeped once, and his chain is swinging and bouncing off his chest. His arms are loose at his sides, and they swing as he moves his legs and hips. The music is getting faster, and the arrows are pointing in all different directions, and he's keeping up perfectly. White Mike sees the kid's face as he spins, and his eyes are closed. And still the machine hasn't beeped. The kid
looks like he is in a trance, and his feet fly out from under him in all directions, and White Mike realizes, as the music speeds up even more, that of course the kid must have the patterns memorized. Then the kid plants a hand on the pad in place of a foot, and as the music speeds up even faster, he is dancing on his hands and feet, doing cartwheels and handstands in place to keep up. And it looks like break dancing, only White Mike cannot believe how graceful it is, and when he glimpses the kid's face again, it is completely relaxed, with the eyes closed easy, not shut tight, as in sleep.

The other kids aren't surprised by this, just watch intently and don't speak. After another minute of this silent frenzy of movement, the music finally stops, and the kid stands still as it ends and, after a moment, gets off the pad and picks up his jacket, and White Mike gets the feeling that the kid looked him right in the eye.

White Mike leaves the arcade, and something about how quiet the kids were, watching, reminds him of the two times he went to church with his mother. Both times were on Christmas Eve. White Mike didn't mind so much, though Charlie, who was with them, hated it. White Mike's mother loved Charlie, always had a particular place in her heart for him. Charlie always thought church was boring, and worse, that it delayed Christmas-present opening, but he went at the behest of White Mike's mother. She was the only one who could ever really make him do anything. White Mike never tried to tell Charlie that he actually liked going
to the church, liked the wooden seats and the sense of ritual and order that came with sitting and half listening to the service.

White Mike is walking from the arcade over the sand down to the water. He does not stop for one of Nathan's world-famous hot dogs. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a dealer talking to a white man with stringy hair. White Mike doesn't know how he knows the guy is a dealer, but he is sure of it. White Mike decides when he sees the drug dealer that this really is a seedy neighborhood and he doesn't feel like hanging around anymore. He looks out over the gray water for another minute; while the waves break and foam on the shore, he notes that the farther out he looks, the calmer it gets, until it is just a solid gray line. The horizon doesn't move.

Just to make sure
, thinks White Mike, as he looks over the ocean, pointing his arms out in front of him. He thinks:
England
. Than he points left:
Canada
. Right:
Mexico
. He turns around and points again:
California. Just to make sure
, he thinks.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

WHITE MIKE GETS
off the train back uptown and is beeped by his most amusing customers. The
thuglings
, White Mike calls them in his head. Timmy and Mark Rothko. They have missed his call to set a place. So he figures he'll make the little fuckers walk. Instead of calling, he sends a text message for them to meet him at Forty-fifth and Fifth in an hour. White Mike wants to walk down Fifth Avenue. He likes looking at all the pretty girls as they pass by. Fifth Avenue is a river of them. White Mike feels like he looks good himself. Sometimes he catches girls staring at him from a distance, and he thinks they do this because he looks a little like a movie star with the overcoat and the jeans. He walks with a purpose, he has somewhere to go.
I have something to do
, he thinks, and that is important, and it makes him walk a better way, and it clears the afternoon.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

“
FUCKIN' FORTY-FIFTH
Street? What in the damn shiz fo a niz?”

Chapter Fifty-Nine

WHEN WHITE MIKE
was fifteen, he had acne on his face that he squeezed because he thought it cleansed his soul. He actually felt cleaner when he did not have the dirt-headed worms burrowed into his fair skin. He was handsome, and he knew it. But he also knew that he wouldn't be attractive, really, with the acne.

His mother picked up on his distress and made him an appointment with her dermatologist. She made it seem like he had no choice, because she knew he would never go on his own, that he would think he was going in for cosmetic treatment. So she told him he had to go get the warts burned off his knee, and why not ask the doctor what she thought about the acne.

So White Mike walked up Fifth Avenue to the dermatologist's office. White Mike always liked Fifth Avenue. It was fall and the leaves were turning, and as they piled, the doormen dressed like midranking Soviet officers swept them into the gutter. White Mike supposed all the doormen looked exactly the same by design. You saw only the uniform. And so many. White Mike was
counting things as he walked. Five blocks, four West Indian women pushing strollers (he recognized the dialect because there were so many West Indian nannies:
shit n'man,
he could imitate
, who de ass gonna say dat ta me?),
two kids in polo shirts on skateboards, one motorcycle, twenty-one doormen so far. It seemed to White Mike that there were always more doormen guarding the bright buildings and ready to help than there were people coming out of them who needed either protection or help.

One doorman took out his whistle and walked into the street, blowing it, trying to hail a cab. A woman in all black and simple gold jewelry looked expensive as she waited under the awning; and then gracefully, because she had much practice, though it is hard to do gracefully, she got into the cab in one fluid motion as the doorman held the car door and then closed it behind her.

There was a woman with a cat on a leash, a gray and white animal, walking down Fifth Avenue. White Mike didn't stare at the cat, but he noticed as it stepped over the little wrought-iron fence around a tree and clawed at the bark. The woman waited patiently, holding the leash. She was wearing a fur coat that came up to her square double chin. Her hair was frizzy and gray and flew out, straight back behind her head. As White Mike walked by, he thought:
I'll never be old.

Chapter Sixty

WHITE MIKE IS
just passing FAO Schwarz and can see huge animals in the window, bigger than he, some of them as big as a small car. Lions and tigers and bears as big as Hondas. White Mike, with the cool air clearing his head on Fifth Avenue, thinks this is funny and, on a whim, walks into the toy store.

It is frenzied inside, even right after Christmas. There are tourists everywhere. White Mike walks to the bear area. There is a big pile of the stuffed creatures on the floor, and kids are climbing all over them. He picks up one of the animals. It is soft and warm and well made, a medium-size polar bear on sale for $99. White Mike strokes it and puts it back down. Then, off to the side, he sees one little boy with curly blond hair clasping a bigger bear's head in his arms. The boy is looking right at White Mike and is chewing on the bear's ear. He is chewing the bear's ear off. White Mike turns his gaze and leaves the store quickly.

Chapter Sixty-One

MARK ROTHKO WENT
downtown one night, with Timmy, to buy a fake ID. Timmy knew this place on Bleecker Street that had a sign advertising ID PICTURES, and he had gotten his ID there. The place was fluorescent-lit and dingy but well stocked with magazines and candy and cigarettes and a copy machine. The man behind the counter showed them a card minus the picture. It had a repeating hologram of the Ohio state flag, the buckeye. He said to Mark Rothko: “Never fails. Only forty dollars.”

“Yeah, let's do this.”

The man pulled his long hair back in a ponytail. Timmy looked at him. The man directed Mark Rothko to stand in front of a white screen, and with a digital camera, he lined up the shot. Then he lowered the tripod and lined up again and finally took the picture. Mark Rothko was awed by the myriad of possibilities opening like a flower in his mind as he held the card and looked into his own eyes. He had a new date of birth. He was born again.

Chapter Sixty-Two

JESSICA WAKES IN
her room, surrounded by her teddy-bear collection. Big bears from FAO Schwarz, little soft bears, old bears with button eyes, brown bears, black bears, all sprawled with her on the bed. The first thing she thinks of is the Twelve she is going to score the next day.
What a drug
, she thinks.
That is a drug for people like me. Tonight, tonight, tonight
. That guy Lionel will come to the party and she'll give him the money and she'll get high. She's got only about three hundred dollars left, but she'll get some other kids to chip in for the sake of the party, and it will all work out.

Jessica doesn't have anything to do until later, when she has to go out to lunch with her mother, so she stays in bed and turns on the TV so she can watch the late-morning talk shows. Jerry Springer and the dregs of humanity, engaged in their backstabbing incestuous homosexual bisexual overweight gothic bizzaro wet-hot fucking and stealing and lying. Jessica is, like, disgusted, you know, but, like, weirdly fascinated also. Maybe that's why sometimes she inquires about the
maid's son, who is in trouble all the time.
Bitch
, she thinks of herself. Maybe she deserves to die, she thinks. Maybe someone ought to kill her.
Pop
. Easy. Shot in the head and then everyone bullshits a eulogy and the parents cry, right, because she was such a lovely girl, such a wonderful, wonderful girl.
Pop pop
, someone comes into school and pulls the trigger. And then they're on television and Jessica lies bleeding and people sit transfixed in front of the television watching it all unfold on CNN and the police come and tie it all up in yellow crime-scene ribbon and send it to you as a gift to unwrap and fuck with and get off on. Right? So someone could just pop her.
Pop
. And she's dead and then everyone would do some more thinking and she'd be dead and would never get to
eew
again, never get to be a bad wife and then a bad parent. Just
pop. Gonna fucking kill that bitch first
. Jessica dazedly arranges her stuffed animals in a circle and talks to them, listens as she hears them talk to one another. It's like the best talk show ever.

“Yeah, point the camera here, we'll have a talk show, sit there,” says Jessica. “So there is a lot of fucked-up stuff in our school, isn't there?”

“Yep,” says little brown Teddy with the black button eyes.

“They all have bad taste in music, they're all assholes,” says Betty, the big soft pink bunny.

“Right. Makes you just want to kill the fuckin' bitch,” says Teddy.

“Ha ha, that's right, but we're not serious. We're not crazy, but who would you kill first and how, if you were to kill someone there?” asks Betty the bunny.

“Well, I think I'd have to kill that Jessica bitch first,” says Teddy. “You know I'd take the gun and be like
pop pop
. Right in the back of the head. Make her kneel like she does for the blow jobs she gives to all those football assholes.” Teddy turns his button eyes to Jessica. “And then, if you were looking at the front of her face, it would seem to bulge out for just a split second, and then there would be blood all in front of her, and she would fall into it and hit her nose, and maybe break it because it might have been weak from surgery or something. And then CNN would come in and get the shot, and then schools across the country could have a moment of silence for the horrible, inexplicable massacre.

“Could we have a moment of silence, please,” continues Teddy, now solemnly, “for those who died. And now could we please have a moment of silence for those who killed them.”