City of Strangers (14 page)

The waiter again. He lowers two steaming plates onto the table before vanishing. Paul has already forgotten what he ordered: an oily spaghetti glistens under a stew of tomatoes, zucchini, and what looks like sausage. He winds a few strands around his fork. It tastes fine, a little salty, but as he chews, it becomes flavorless and rubbery between his teeth, heavy on the tongue; he swallows quickly. Ben doesn't eat, only stabs at the corners of his mouth with his napkin. Staring at Paul, he lifts his knife, then sets it down. His fingers, not his face, disclose his agitation: he rubs them together as if testing a banknote.

He says, 'Nothing I can say is going to make you understand. I would maybe keep trying if I thought there was any chance.'

'You are the most bullheaded son of a bitch I know,' says Paul. 'That's why I was surprised to find you praying. Of all people, you seem least in need of outside approval. You make up your mind and will listen to no other argument. Not even one that comes directly from God.'

'Is that who I am?'

As he says this, Ben looks weary. Many fail where Ben succeeded – pulling himself apart from the identity handed to him at birth, no matter what the cost. Men have always tried to tear off the skin of family, the weight, to be greater than what they were given, to be better and sturdier and wiser, to be more important. They almost always fail. Ben has been tireless in scrubbing away the dead history. Paul always assumed it came easily to him, as naturally as breathing, but now he realizes the truth: his brother's has been a life of work. The man sitting on the other side of the table is a creation entirely of his own design.

He says, 'I got an offer to do a book.'

'Yeah.' Relief floods Ben's face; he, too, wants a reprieve. 'You mentioned something about it – the cartoons, right? Those riots? You know, it occurred to me the other day, your book, and I think it's terrific. Someone needs to write about it. There's too much apology going on, too much coddling of these fanatics. All this lip service paid to tolerance. We're just supposed to tolerate murder and lunacy? In my opinion, it's just another kind of terrorism. It's insane, all those people running around, yelling about the desecration of their prophet, all because of a few stupid cartoons. How many embassies have they destroyed? Christ. It makes you think that the world is going to end, that they're really going to blow it all up.'

Paul waits for his brother to finish, then shakes his head. He says, 'I'm going to write a book about Dad.'

Ben sets down his glass.

'It's going to be a memoir. Sort of. An editor is—'

His brother cuts him off. 'Frank? About Frank?'

'Ben, listen—'

'You're going to preserve that man in print?'

It jars him, always, the velocity with which Ben can swerve into hostility. He doesn't give Paul a chance to elaborate, to clarify. Ben has drummed against that soreness which stretches across any thought of their father, and it causes a sudden, acute ire to materialize within him – his chest feels like a set of tightly clamped teeth – and so, instead of explaining his plans for the book, he finds himself, once more, annotating the father for the sake of the brother.

'That man who spoke,' says Paul, his voice rising a little, 'that man who got up and talked about Dad? You remember. His name was Greenberg. Shel Greenberg. He said that for a full year Dad got him newspapers and groceries, and his name was fucking
Greenberg
. Dad must've known that. If he carried around such hatred in his heart, if he was such a bigot, how did he bring himself to perform this act of kindness, day in and day out, an entire year of favors, for a Jew?'

'You're saying that buying the
Daily News
and a few melons for some softheaded old retiree makes up for what he did? You're saying that a year of small chores in the service of a neighbor is all it takes? That anyone can be absolved of his crimes by the testimony of a few neighbors? Let's go down to Argentina then. I'm sure Eichmann's neighbors adored him. I'll bet they were truly saddened when Mossad kicked in the door and hauled him off. The conversation was probably the same for days afterward: "He was such a nice man, loved his daughters."'

'Eichmann had sons, actually.'

'I don't care! Frank can buy newspapers for thirty Greenbergs. I don't care.' Ben grasps at his glass of wine and a mouthful churns up to his lips. 'He can take them all out for matzo-ball soup. I don't care.'

'This man cared. Shel Greenberg cared. He didn't even have to convert to make his point.'

This has the desired effect. Ben drinks sourly from his glass.

Paul says, 'You can refuse to forgive Dad, if that's what you want. But he was a human being. He was as complicated and fucked up as anyone else. It isn't all a matter of good and evil.'

Ben sighs. He drags the fork across the tablecloth like a plow, leaving four parallel striations that quickly fade.

'He swore his allegiance to Hitler. Frank wasn't a child. He wasn't coerced. You do that and it's over. You're done. There is no coming back from that kind of moral ruin. Was Hitler "complicated"? Just fucked up? Tell me, Paul. Tell me what, since you refuse to believe in evil.'

'Our father wasn't Hitler.'

'Isn't it a luxury, this reasonableness of yours.'

'Shut up, Ben. I'm just trying to be calm.'

'Fine, be calm. You fucking be the calm one. I apologize that in the face of what my father did I don't have the ability to remain calm. I'm sick of this. I'm sick of trying to explain to you what should be plainly fucking obvious. At this point it's your willful ignorance as much as anything that pisses me off. That you think you're only being a good son, or whatever.'

They fall into silence. Ben chews heatedly on a bite of food. He speaks of Paul's choices – his faithlessness, his unwillingness to discard their father – as signs of weakness, as if they somehow represent a failure of manhood, and Paul, in response, feels a rare anger, the kind that licenses rashness, surrounding otherwise stupid actions with something like glee. He stares at his brother, whose eyes seem indissolubly dark, pupil and iris melting into a single inkblot.

'What would you do if God told you to?'

'Excuse me?'

'You're willing to condemn the protestors who say they're defending their prophet, but you believe, too. You speak so vehemently of it, your belief. Tell me what you would do.'

'Are you trying to lump me in with those nuts?'

'Why not?'

'Christ, Paul.'

'Terrorists believe in God, too. Even more fully than you.'

'Fuck you, if you want to talk like that.'

The words tremble below his tongue. 'What if God told you to blow yourself up?'

'Fuck you.' Ben wrestles his napkin from his lap and throws it into his uneaten food.

'What if God came down and tapped you on the shoulder. Then what? You pray, Ben, you believe in God. You say it takes such strength. It takes strength to fly planes into buildings, too.'

His brother signals to the waiter, who comes promptly, and before he can produce the check Ben shoves a credit card at him.

Paul says, 'Abraham would have slit his son's throat.' He feels light, elated. How easy this is, how perilously and thrillingly easy, to push and pull his brother's emotional levers. 'What if God told Abraham instead to strap a bomb to his chest, to fill his pockets with nails and ball bearings and broken glass, to board a bus at noon and detonate himself in the middle of a crowd of old ladies and little schoolchildren?'

'You've lost it, Paul. I don't hear a word of what you're saying. You're absolutely gone.'

'Do you defy God or do you kill innocent people? Did the terrorists simply choose the wrong god? Is that what you tell yourself?'

The waiter returns. Ben signs the form absently, leaves a large tip. He stands and rips his jacket off the back of the chair.

'What do you tell yourself, Ben? How does Ben Metzger make himself believe in God?'

Ben takes two steps away before stopping: something he's remembered. He turns and fixes Paul with his eyes.

'Come get your fucking father out of my car.'

Rain catches him between the subway and his apartment. He manages to protect the urn, holding it under his jacket, but the distance to his door is too great to spare himself a soaking. He doesn't immediately strip off his wet clothes. Instead, after setting the urn on the windowsill, the first available spot, he goes straight to the kitchen and retrieves a bottle of beer, then sits down on his wet bottom and watches the window, listening to the rain's soft, depressing applause. A car makes its way down the block, traveling at low speed, its headlights set to bright. It reaches the end of the block and idles. The malty scent of beer rises from the bottle's neck. Outside, the car seems to have found its way: it inches past the stop line, then gains speed and travels up the block into soupy darkness, out of view. The bottle is quickly gone. He retrieves another, and, after that, a third. Each bottle he finishes he sets on the floor, and they collect around his feet like a detachment of exhausted soldiers. He loses the grip on his anxiety, not from conscious effort, but because it has withered and become desiccated in the desert of his inebriation; the more he drinks, the drier he is, as the moisture leaves his lips, his tongue, his inward provinces.

His hand reaches for the phone and dials Claire's number. She will know he's drinking; he doesn't care. It rings several times before he hangs up. He tells himself once more that Sunday night, the memory of which has drifted and fractured already, did not for Claire represent the beginnings of a reunion. He doesn't know what she wanted. He knows only that it was different from what he wanted. Paul has another beer, then stands, waggling his arms and legs to start the blood moving. But even one step seems to upset some fragile, important balance. Paul hesitates, loses his footing. He's at the first stage of drunkenness, a little hazy, eager for more: eager to plunge his head underneath, into the congenial abyss that he knows awaits him on the other side of seven, eight, ten bottles. Morning will come, with its unwelcome renewal of sobriety, but in the meantime he can drink as much as he likes. Nobody's here to tell him otherwise. No funerals tomorrow, no meetings. He takes a step back, stumbles, kicks the bottles on the floor. They scatter in a babble of glass. It dies quickly; they settle on their sides. Silence is always most silent in the wake of a disturbance.

Enough. Deeply and suddenly tired, he removes his funeral clothes, his shoes, jacket, and tie, and makes a damp pile on the floor. Off, socks. Off, lights. He's already crawling onto the pullout as he tears away his shirt. Pants. In a quick motion, a wing beating once against the air, he plucks a tissue from the box on the nearby table. Claire forms. Images from Sunday night mix with older recollections. He's half erect as he begins, half erect as he finishes. With a tired shudder he comes into the tissue – hard to believe that this, under different circumstances, could father a child. He tosses it away, and for an instant it glides along the air, with the indifference of a dandelion puff, before sailing into the garbage.

He thinks again of Claire. His father. Ben. They are all too little, and, somehow, too much. Terence: a broken figure at the end of the street, cigarette jutting alertly from his lips. Abraham and Isaac, remembered from a painting he once saw: Isaac, blindfolded, his bare neck bulging with blood, and bald, bearded Abraham. His eyes are small, dark, and certain. The knife hangs like a raindrop frozen in midflight. The paint tells its age; Abraham's cheek splits apart like clay. White wings, in the distance, descend upon petrified air.
Abraham, Abraham. Here I am.
As his mind sifts through these last vestiges of thought, as exhaustion rises into sleep, Paul finds it impossible to say which are worse, the angels who make themselves known to us, or the ones that never do.

He wakes to the sound of the telephone. It featured briefly in his dream, but he doesn't remember the form it took – bomb, doorbell, alarm. Nor can he recall what sort of dream it was, though he has the impression that it was vivid. The logic of nearby objects leads him back to the world. He reviews the proof of his identity: the wallet on the shelf, the clothes on the floor, the particular arrangement of chair, table, mirror. Nothing is distinct, lovingly or specially chosen. They are the things that belong to any man who lives alone. At the horizon of his thoughts throbs a vague but familiar sadness.

But it isn't his phone – the sound leaks in through the thin wall that separates his apartment from the neighbor's. At last it stops. He clears his eyes and looks out the window at the angled slab of sky, sawed off by the roofline of nearby buildings, the squat aluminum chimneys and abandoned television aerials. The view is newly obstructed: his father's urn hunches there, its blocky contours gracelessly slicing away a piece of scenery. Outside, the world is gray, not only failing to provide light but draining it from the room. A dead leaf, sailing on the wind, flickers briefly into view. He listens to the faint sizzle of morning traffic. Other people are awake.

As for Paul, he has awoken into the familiar, constricted pain of a hangover: his tongue feels monstrous and blistery; his bladder is pinched; sweat grips his face all the way down to his neck. He needs to drink less, and less often. He looks again at the urn and an impulse strikes him. He rises, shaves, showers. He bolts a large glass of water. After drying and dressing, he collects the urn from the sill and leaves.

He goes to the lake in the park. The peppery, whitish ash, which he expected to dissolve like powdered lemonade, clumps and drifts like algae on the surface of the cold water; he waits for it to sink and afterward deposits the empty urn in the first trash can he passes. He feels a shudder as it drops, as it hits bottom, thudding with the strength of something full. This improvisation must violate the laws of burial – the religious ones, surely, and perhaps even the civil ones; human remains may even constitute a health hazard. And certainly he has already disobeyed some rule of mourning: he has almost certainly disobeyed all of them. Not knowing what else to do with himself, he walks to the cafe, where he sees Pirro, pinballing from cash register to espresso machine and back, busily conveying cups between the two. There's a line. It is a Friday and people have given themselves permission to go into work a little late. Reaching under the counter, Pirro brings up a pair of fat morning muffins, their surfaces knobby with bright red berries, and deftly wraps them in purses of wax paper. He won't have a chance to talk, which is a relief, actually. He smiles at Paul, who has reached the front of the line. 'Cold today,' he says. 'But they say the sun comes back tomorrow.'

'If that's what they say.'

'Thank God.'

'Small coffee.'

He pays and turns to go. He has a vague awareness that he should say something more, to acknowledge that he and Pirro are now more than the transaction between customer and server; but they aren't, and he can't. Instead he calls Claire. Her voice appears abruptly on the fourth ring, after she has seen his name on her phone's screen and, he can be sure, deliberated before answering; until now he's forgotten that he called her last night as well.

He says, 'He's dead.'

She needs a second to interpret this. 'Your father?'

'Yes. Tuesday.'

'How are you?'

He makes no reply. His ear fills with Claire's impatient breathing.

'Can I see you?'

The line falls silent. 'When?'

'Now.'

'I have to go to work.'

'Just for a little while. Please, Claire.' He hates the plaintive note that creeps into his voice.

She pauses long enough that he thinks the signal may have been lost. At last she says: 'Okay. I can go in a little late today. But hurry up.' He tries to ignore the suggestion, in her tone, that she owes him this, that she hasn't agreed to see him so much as to give him an audience.

Manhattan. He changes lines. The train he boards is crowded enough that there is nowhere to sit. He always wonders about these people, who, like him, are not at work during work hours. Everyone has a reason. His profession is respectable enough, and he doesn't hang his head when someone asks what he does – he does not have to say he is unemployed – but he nonetheless feels an associated discomfort at being part of this slack daylight tribe. The inertia of these lives is palpable. Heads toss gently from side to side like drowsy underwater reeds as the train makes a ramshackle approach into the flooding lights of the Astor Place station. He feels calmer now, closer to Claire; only a handful of stops remain. Paul has no idea what he plans to say. He isn't proud of using his father's death as a crowbar to break into his wife's day, but the thought of seeing her makes him happy in a simple way, although he knows he shouldn't let himself have such naive emotions. What is he expecting? To sleep with her again? No, he tells himself, I am not expecting that. I just want to see her and speak with her. Paul studies the passengers around him, their bodies fattened by winter layers: closed eyes, numb staring eyes, collapsed shoulders, heads sinking into open pages. People do read, then, at least on the subway. He sees tabloid newspapers, miniature Bibles, self-help guides with titles like
Growing Through Divorce
and
The Science of Getting Rich
and
Healing Back Pain
. Then, at the end of the car, he spots a face which, like an actor's from a half-remembered film, is familiar without at once being identifiable, and the agitation opens slowly within him, delicately unwrapping itself. Terence must have been following him all morning.

They come to another station. Paul stands at one set of doors, and as passengers board and depart, bumping and prodding him, he keeps his eyes pinned on Terence, who does not return his gaze, as if he's just another commuter, an innocent platelet in the midday flow. The heat of the platform feels as close as breath from a mouth on Paul's neck, and under his coat, under his shirt, perspiration springs up, forming a thick glaze; uncontrollable processes – in his heart and his veins, in his lungs – fire up throughout his body. The train pulls out of the station.

It moves with the lazy cow's waddle that means it closely follows the train ahead. The next stop is Claire's. When Paul looks again, Terence has vanished. His eyes search wildly and he picks him up, that cap of pale hair, moving toward him through the car. He tenses. But Terence stops, lowering himself into a seat that has opened up, one from which he has a direct line of sight to Paul. They watch each other through the thicket of limbs, heads, torsos, until Terence glances away. It is oddly chilling.

He has to make a plan. Terence can't do much here, in a train car packed with human insulation, but if there has to be some sort of confrontation, if the particles of hostility that hang about him assemble into violence, it cannot happen at Claire's doorstep. Paul could pretend that he's not about to disembark and then slip between the doors: Terence might miss it. Paul tightens his grip around the handlebar as the train slows. The moment has a terrible surface tension. He balances on the balls of his feet and, out of the corner of his eye, observes Terence, who sits alertly. A mechanical whisper indicates that the doors are about to open: he leans toward them and for an instant separates his gaze from his pursuer. The doors open. Before moving he looks once to check on Terence and finds that he has gotten to his feet, his eyes fixed firmly and attentively upon Paul – those eyes, brown and even a little sullen, as if wounded that he would even consider sneaking off. The doors shut and they are once again on their way.

Terence looks away again, almost with a shrug, as soon as the train is out of the station. They have been at this little game long enough that Paul's initial fear has dulled and, as his chance to see Claire passes, it cools into annoyance. Terence wants to see what he can get away with, how long Paul will put up with him. Still, a face-off, even in the safety of a public place, seems unwise. Paul needs to put distance between them. Later, he will have to phone the police again, and this time he must make them take his complaint seriously; he will go down to the station, give a description, explain the pattern of harassment. For now, he can get off in midtown and use the size and drift of crowds to his advantage. The train clocks through two more stations; Terence stands in wait as serenely as a mannequin. Grand Central comes and goes with a great respiratory exchange of passengers, and, at Fifty-first Street, Paul makes his move. Without even looking – surely he is being followed – he slingshots through the doors and pushes toward the front of the crowd as it slows and branches into thin capillaries at the gates. Enough people become like water; they force an exit. Someone punches through the emergency gate, igniting the alarm's dizzy ululation. Paul slips through the scarred iron door – for him this qualifies as an emergency – and once more he emerges at street level.

Rainwater stands at the curb in silver puddles, and a high, stern sun glares down. Paul extends his strides as he turns east. He passes through the warm, chalky steam blossoming from the vents of a laundromat, through the salt-and-lard odor at the door of a Chinese takeaway joint, through the bent shadows of fire escapes and empty stoops. The light at Third Avenue halts him and he turns south. Unaccustomed to exercise and already starved for oxygen, the muscles in his legs burn and complain, cramping into aching little knots, and Paul curses under his breath, furious at his body's unreliability, furious at himself for failing to halt its decline. What is he afraid of? What can Terence do to him out in the open? He crosses Third Avenue at Forty-ninth Street, jogging to beat the serrated edge of advancing cars; the nasal snort of a horn admonishes him just as he hops onto the next curb. He wants to lose Terence in the lunchtime crowds near the river. Tourists clot in front of a man selling cheap neckties and belts, and Paul wades through them.

Turning onto Forty-eighth Street, he nearly collides with someone, and when he looks up to apologize he recognizes the face. The man is an actor, a relatively famous one, and he is eating an apple; his lips are bright with juice. Startled, Paul walks past, and he now sees that he has stumbled upon the set of a film. Men with headsets wave to each other and write on clipboards, and others march in and out of long white trucks. On the sidewalk is a table littered with food: bagels, muffins, sliced fruit, a steel urn of coffee. White screens, stretched like sails, frame the entrance to an apartment building in the middle of the block, along with equally large mirrors, angled expectantly upward; lamps the size of car tires splash everything in unnatural white light. He doesn't see any cameras.

He emerges onto Second Avenue, continuing south, and can find no sign of Terence, although that doesn't mean anything. He crosses the avenue toward Hammarskjöld Plaza and only when he is halfway between sidewalks does he notice the gathering on the opposite side of the street. Crowds he was expecting, but these people are collected in the hundreds – they number perhaps more than a thousand – and they clearly belong together; they have the slack knitting of an audience at a concert. Paul then sees that their attention is directed at a man standing in front of a microphone and dressed from head to toe in white.

He mixes into the group's raggedy fringe. Here and there stand uniformed police officers, laden with metal and gear, and on a rooftop high above he sees the glint from a pair of binoculars. A television crew hangs off to the side. Above the belt of the river, flags, certain of their importance, straighten in the wind. Terence has disappeared. Paul presses deeper into the crowd, and eventually finds himself in its concentrated heart, where he can barely move. Most of the faces around him aren't white.

The man addressing the crowd has been speaking in a language Paul doesn't recognize, but suddenly he switches to English. 'The burning of buildings and the loss of lives have been unacceptable. People who love God and Muhammad are becoming overwhelmed by their anger.' He goes on. It's about the cartoons, then – this, too, is a protest, like those he has seen on television, with their scorched flags and burning cars and vandalized embassies. Applause crackles around Paul. The strange weather that ripples through those crowds overseas doesn't seem to have taken hold here: people are attentive and calm; a policeman checks his wristwatch as the speaker slips again into what must be Arabic. Men in black flank him, in stark contrast to his white robes; behind sunglasses they wear stoic expressions. Security men.

The speech continues. Growing concerned about his lack of mobility, Paul begins to thread his way to the other side, toward the horizon of the East River and the rough face of Queens, where the Citigroup tower stands awkwardly upon the low borough. He is aided by a loosening of the crowd, for which he detects no apparent cause; people are pulling apart, creating channels of space. He checks again for Terence. As he reaches the other edge, he notices the movement around him. They're turning as one to face the river – and, because it is where he happens to be, Paul. Has he done something? But their eyes all gaze beyond him, well beyond him, beyond the river and Queens, beyond even the Atlantic Ocean. He recognizes at once what this is. A voice of warm monotony, with a cello's plangent timbre, puffs out across the clumps of heads, intoning words Paul doesn't know. The call to prayer. It is followed by silence. For the space of a breath nothing happens, and then, at once, the hundreds of bodies fall, like blades of grass blown flat by the wind; the sound rolls over him like the sound from a building collapsing in the distance. They are humble, devout, good. People fold their legs and prostrate themselves, hands clapped to the concrete, foreheads balanced between them like delicate ceramics; they use sliced-up cardboard boxes and unfurled garbage bags to protect their knees from the damp ground. Paul's head pounds. He has never seen so many people pray at once: it is like seeing a tidal wave for the first time, or a tornado, an asteroid. He was part of this crowd a moment ago, one of many, and now he stands alone; now, even worse, he is in the way.