Lowboy (8 page)

Lateef didn’t answer.

“I hadn’t planned to have a child—Alex had three kids already, with his first wife—but when Will was born I became a different person.” She hesitated. “Does that make sense?”

“Different in what way?”

She brought her knees together. “I’d expected to need Alex more once the baby was born, but the truth was I needed him less. I felt like a dead body brought back to life, and it was Will who had done that, not Alex. I had everything suddenly instead of nothing.” She shook her head slowly. “From the day he was born I told him every thought that flitted through my head: I talked to him for hours on end. It never occurred to me to keep the least thing from him. I needed a friend—an equal, an adult—and I brought Will up to play that role for me.” She let her eyes rest on Lateef. “Will had no say in any of this, of course. It never would have occurred to him to object. That’s what I mean, Detective, when I tell you that I asked too much of him.”

Lateef said nothing for a moment. “It must have been hard for you when Emily came along.”

“It was very hard for me.”

“What did you think of her?”

She stared out at the curb. “I didn’t know what to do with Emily. She confused me. I treated her the way you treat your complainants.”

“Poor Emily.”

“The first time Will brought her over, I thought she’d been sent by the school to make sure he got home. She was terribly excited to be mixed up in something so serious.” She bit her lip for a while. “Will was still functioning then, still able to go to school most of the time. He left the two of us in the kitchen and went straight to his room and shut the door. I didn’t know what to think. I was about to thank Emily for escorting him home when she smiled at me, like any other girl with a crush would do, and told me that she’d met Will on the train. She was a perfectly normal-seeming teenager, polite and well-spoken, but there was something desperate in the way she looked at me. What could this girl want from us? I thought. I asked her what Will had done, still thinking that something must have happened, but she just looked down at the floor and said, ‘He didn’t have to do anything, really.’ I don’t know which of us was more embarrassed.”
She took another deep breath. “She ended up staying the night.”

Lateef raised his eyebrows. “In your son’s room?”

She smiled. “You’re forgetting my possessiveness, Detective. I made a bed for her out on the couch.”

“What about the girl’s parents?”

“I called them, of course. Emily asked me not to but I insisted. I was expecting trouble—a few awkward questions, at least—but her father couldn’t have cared less. He told me that it happened all the time.”

“Not the possessive type, apparently.”

“Not so much,” said Violet. “Shouldn’t we be getting out?”

“Of course,” he said, fumbling with his seatbelt. “After you, Miss Heller.”

She waited for a bike to pass, a model citizen, then opened her door and eased out gracefully. Lateef stayed in the car a moment longer, frowning at his reflection in the driver-side mirror. You’re flirting with her, he said to himself. The idea depressed him. He often joked with his complainants, especially the difficult ones, but in this case it brought no advantage. Watch yourself, Professor White, he thought. You’ve already made at least one joke too many.

It turned out he needn’t have worried. She was standing on the curb with her arms crossed against the cold, oblivious to the looks of passersby, waiting impatiently for him to join her. The women looked her over as they passed, letting their eyes linger on her loose and charmless clothes; the men simply stared at her face. When he finally followed her out of the car, he realized that she’d been trying to speak to him.

“What was that, Miss Heller?”

“I don’t want you to misunderstand what I’ve told you, that’s all.” She turned away from him as she spoke, glancing down into a grate beside her feet. “I may have aggravated my son’s illness—I won’t deny that—but I didn’t cause it.”

“It’s my understanding that schizophrenia is caused by genetics,” Lateef said carefully.

“They don’t have a clue what it’s caused by,” she said, hunching over. “They don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“That’s not true, Miss Heller.” He coughed into his fist. “They’ve done tests that show an electrical difference in the brain. And they have medication to treat it, like any other illness of the body. The Thorazine, for example, that your son was taking—”

“Thorazine!” she said fiercely. Her back was turned on him now but he could picture her contemptuous smile regardless. “Do you know how they discovered Thorazine, Detective? By mistake. They were using it as a tranquilizer in surgery.” She nodded to herself. “They have no idea why Thorazine works, or Clozapine, or any of their other silver bullets. Schizophrenia might as well come from eating powdered sugar.”

“It isn’t caused by needy mothers, though. No one’s made that claim for years.”

She looked at him now. “I aggravated my son’s condition, Detective Lateef.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He looked around vainly for Officer Leo Martinez, Twenty-third Precinct, who was supposedly working the corner. Violet had already turned back to the grate. He felt awkward behind her, stifflimbed and useless, a feeling he generally reserved for his days off. One of the benefits of his work was that it made no allowance for awkwardness: awkwardness was an Upper East Side luxury. His father had told him that once, and he’d laughed at his father, but the idea had stuck. And now he’d been reduced to the role of observer—worse than that, of witness—and his work had failed to offer him protection. The moment passed quickly, but it left him bewildered. His irritation at Martinez mounted. I’ll make that boy hop when he gets here, he thought, and the idea brought him comfort of a kind.

“Is this the grate?” Violet said suddenly. “This one here?”

“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. The on-duty officer—”

“There’s a room down there,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She bent down and brought her face close to the grate. “A bed with some clothes on it. A little blue suitcase.”

Lateef squatted next to her. “I wouldn’t call that a bed,” he said, feeling more ineffectual than ever. “A comforter, that’s all, or some kind of—”

“This is it,” she said, touching the grate with her fingers. “This is where Will was seen.”

Just then a boy in a uniform appeared around the corner, tearing a packet of Dutch Masters open with his teeth. The uniform seemed too big for him, cut for someone less dainty, and in spite of his painstakingly nurtured mustache he barely looked old enough to smoke. He grinned when he saw them and held out a hand to Lateef. “Detective!” he said, looking past him at Violet. “Very nice to meet you. Thanks for coming.”

“Officer Martinez?” Lateef said, keeping his hands in his pockets.

“Right,” Martinez said, tipping his hat to Violet. “And this lady is …?”

“Yda Heller,” said Violet.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Heller. I hope you don’t mind—”

“What have you got for us, Officer?” Lateef cut in.

Martinez cleared his throat. “Well, sir. Not so much. I saw the boy.”

“What boy?”

“Sorry, Detective,” Martinez said indulgently. “I saw a boy. Fitting the description you sent out.”

“Where was this?”

Martinez glanced over his shoulder, as if confiding a secret, then pointed at the grate under their feet.

Lateef looked at Violet, but she was on her knees already, craning her neck to see into the shaftway. He beckoned Martinez closer. “I have no doubt, Officer Martinez, that this is more fun for you than standing in front of Dunkin’ Donuts pretending to be a traffic light, but Miss Heller and I are a little pressed for time. Where—where exactly—did you see the boy?”

“Right in there,” Martinez said, sticking out his lower lip. “Right where she’s looking at.”

“You’re sure it was him?” Violet said without turning. “Did he tell you his name?”

Martinez smiled again. “Ain’t too many blond kids screwing around down there, Miss Heller.”

“Someone was with him?” Lateef said. “A woman?”

Martinez nodded. “She run away, though. Both of them did. Back into the tunnel.”

Violet looked at him over her shoulder. “How long ago was that?”

“Quarter to eleven.”

“Half an hour,” she said, sitting back on her heels.

“Thirty-seven minutes,” Martinez corrected her, looking at his watch. “Thirty-eight, actually.”

Lateef shook his head. “And these grates don’t open?”

“Not for us, sir,” Martinez said brightly. “You got to call MTA central for the key. They don’t even have it at the station.”

“And you did that, I assume?” Lateef said, bringing his hands together in an attitude of prayer.

“Did what?”

“Called the MTA. Put in a key request.”

Martinez coughed and looked down at his belt.

“All right,” said Lateef. He took in a slow and charitable breath. “All right, Martinez. Go ahead and place that call.”

“He’s long gone,” Violet murmured.

“Martinez,” Lateef said, keeping his voice level, “go down into that station—go right now, do you hear me?—and put in that request.”

Martinez grinned at Violet. “I got to tell you, Detective—”

Lateef spun on his heels and raised his eyebrows at Martinez. Martinez sidled off, muttering to himself, running a thumb over his mustache as if to reassure himself that it was still in place.

A long and uneventful moment passed. Violet seemed to have forgotten why they’d come. “Thirty-eight minutes,” she said, staring off into the traffic. “He could be in Sheepshead Bay by now.”

“He could be,” said a small voice. “But he not.”

Slowly, deliberately, with no outward sign of surprise, Violet brought her face down to the grate. “Have you seen my son?”

A laugh. “I more than
seen
him, Lady Bird.”

Lateef was crouched next to Violet now, shielding his eyes from the glare off the street. In the halflight underneath the grate an upturned face looked toward them, as flat and empty as a cardboard box. The face seemed to be smiling.

T
he doors came together and the C started rolling and Lowboy made himself invisible. He’d come out onto the platform ahead of the train and he didn’t think the motorman had seen him. On the other hand there was no sure way of telling. His eyes were dazzled by the tubelights and his legs were weak from running and his head was alive with what the wall had told him. I’ll get off at the next stop, he thought, checking his pantlegs for soot. I’ll switch to the downtown local. He kept his breath steady and tried not to seem too excited.

For once no one was watching him. Two middle-aged women in biker jackets were having a fight across the aisle and nobody seemed to have noticed him sit down. He waited a moment longer, watching the women sneer and poke at each other with their short ungraceful fingers, then decided it was safe to close his eyes. Things got quiet right away. He thought about what had happened with Heather Covington, how his body had stopped listening to his brain, and decided that he felt all right about it. There were reasons why it didn’t work, he thought. It was cold for one thing. And anyone could have seen us. And she smelled like she was 1,000,000,000 years old.

Her name wasn’t even Heather Covington, he said to himself. I can’t believe I ever thought it was.

He could tell by the shifting of his body against the seat that the train was coming into a station. The airbrakes kicked in and people stumbled to their feet but he was having too many thoughts to switch trains now. Sourceless revelations sparked and spun behind his eyelids and memories flashed like stoplights in between. He drew himself up and made his Sherlock Holmes face and tried to have just one thought at a time. Rafa, he thought. That’s what the officer called her. Smells like good times down there, Rafa. He stared at the pocked brown floor between his shoes. “Rafa,” he said quietly, feeling the sound climb out of his throat. It sounded like a Mexican curseword.

The brakes kicked in harder and the train came up short. He sat forward when the C# and A sounded and discovered that the car was almost empty. The women with the men’s haircuts were outside now, laughing and nodding and rolling their eyes at each other. The few people left were sitting alone doing nothing. He let his eyes close again.

The problem was this, he thought. I didn’t know her. No one does it that way. They find somebody they know to do it with. That makes it private: a confidential matter. That makes it safe. They do it in the comfort of their homes.

Either that or they pay for it, he thought.

“I wonder how much it would cost,” Lowboy said out loud. He remembered the money he’d found and how Heather Covington had picked it up and kept it. More than twenty, he thought. It would cost more than that. Unless you had a girlfriend. He smiled stupidly into the crook of his bent arm. If you had a girlfriend maybe twenty would be enough.

An idea came to him then. Like all good ideas it was so obvious and straightforward that it seemed ridiculous at first. But the more he thought about the idea the bigger and more beautiful it grew,
spreading out in all directions like a stain, until it was the only one he had. Before the train pulled out again he knew where he was going next and why.

I’ll go to her, he thought. She wanted to do it: she told me herself. She told me on the stairs at Union Square. It’s got to happen sometime, Will, she said. It happens to every person in the world.

I’ll do it to you right now, if you want me to. He let his eyes open. She told me that.

I’ll do it to you, Will. And then you can do it to me. Just put both of your arms around me like this.

He made two fists and took a breath and held it. She was hard to think about, harder even than Violet, but he could do it if he thought of her as nameless. Her name was off-limits to him, strictly prohibited. I know her name anyway, he said to himself. I know what she was called. But when he tried to say the word he made no sound at all.

Her face was easier to think about, less of a risk, but try as he might he couldn’t get it clear. He dug his thumbs into his skull and tried again. Her pale smooth face that had always been so friendly. At school he’d tried to draw it in a book, once they’d let him have a book, but each picture he’d drawn had been less true. On the first page there had been a slight resemblance, just enough to place her, but by the middle she could have been any girl at all. As the weeks passed he found himself copying details from one sketch to another instead of trying to find her likeness in his memory. Her decaying longsuffering likeness. On the last day he’d drawn a circle with two slanting lines on top of it, a little round house without any openings. After that he’d put the book away.

That was when everything went flat, like cutouts in a children’s pop-up book, and he decided not to get up out of bed. The school turned itself into a cutout, sharpedged and glossy as a postcard, and he kept low to keep from punching holes in it. But in spite of his best efforts holes were made. He forgot about her then, forgot about everyone but Violet, and swallowed every last thing he was fed.
Meds were slid between his teeth like change into a meter. Time went by.

I wonder where she’s living now, he thought. I wonder whether she still goes to Crowley. He thought it over for a while, weighing the pros and the cons, then finally decided that she did. Of course she still goes to Crowley, he said to himself. She was on the waitlist for Crowley before her parents even met. He thought about her father, huge and righteous in his terrycloth robe, reading
The Economist
out loud at the kitchen counter. The most fatherish father there had ever been. He would never take his daughter out of Crowley.

The train pulled into the next station and the car began to fill with halfdead people. That’s the tiredness, thought Lowboy. They want to curl up on the ground and go to sleep. He yawned at them as they came in, showing them his teeth, and some of them yawned back. The little whitehaired woman next to him was wearing a mink pillbox hat. Jehovah’s Witness, he decided. She was eating nuts out of a napkin and muttering to herself, and as he watched her it occurred to him that he was starving. That’s something else that I need money for, he thought. Homefries and bacon. Honeydipped nuts. He pointed at his mouth but she ignored him.

The doors closed after exactly ten seconds and the station fell resignedly away. He’d seen the sleight of hand a thousand times be-fore—the room whose doors close on one place and open, after a few minutes of darkness, on another—but today he was seeing the world with different eyes. The walls of the car, for example, which had always seemed so solid, were actually as hollow as an egg. A hole had been cut into the bottom of his seat and behind it was a dusky fibrous vacuum. The pencaps and candywrappers stuffed into the opening only made the hole seem emptier. Another stageset, Lowboy thought, and bit down on his sleeve to keep from laughing. Unreality broke over him again, stronger and more emphatic than before, but this time he was able to endure it. It’s a wave, that’s all,
he told himself. A wave like any other. You can ride it like a surfer if you want to.

In the furrows between crests of the wave he saw things very sharply, the way the air comes clear after a rain. He saw the inside of the car for what it was: a controlled environment, a staging area, planned down to the last detail by people he would never know or see. No surprises in here, Lowboy said to himself. No accidents. He studied each element of the car with his new eyes, imagining it as a kind of blueprint:

He would never meet the people who’d drawn the blueprint, never have a chance to question them, but he could learn things just by looking at the car. You could see, for example, that they were fearful men. The pattern on the walls, which he’d always taken to be meaningless, was actually made up of thousands of miniature coats of arms, symbols of the authority of the state. The interior of the car was waterproof, the better to be hosed down in case of bloodshed. And the seats were arranged not for maximum efficiency, not to seat the greatest number of people comfortably and safely, but to express the designers’ fear with perfect clarity. No one sat with their back turned to anyone else.

He decided to get out at Columbus Circle. To his surprise it happened very simply. He stood up and guided himself into the funnel of exiting bodies, feeling the space around him compress like air
sucked into a jet, and let himself be spat onto the platform. The people around him never pitched or stumbled. It’s only when you think about things that they get hard to do, he thought. A Bronx-bound D pulled up across the platform and the crush of bodies grew more intricate. How easy this is, Lowboy said to himself, letting the crowd spin him clockwise. So much easier than standing still. Whole families pushed past him as if he were nothing but a misplaced turnstile. After a quarter of an hour, like tidewater playing with a cigarette filter, the current had brought him full circle. But as soon as he thought about what he was doing he froze in his tracks like a deer.

He might have stayed there forever if the tunnel had let him: he might even have forgotten his calling. But from one moment to the next the crowd was blown away like smoke and he was left alone again. He propped himself against a column and looked around him, wondering where everyone had gone. Assorted panhandlers and tourists remained but they seemed pitiful as orphans in the sudden hush. As if no train were ever coming for them.

On the far side of the column a man was standing with his back to Lowboy, in exactly the relation the cars were designed to prevent. A show of power, Lowboy said to himself. A territorial display. The man’s right hand held a black leather briefcase, the kind people handcuff themselves to in movies, and his left hand held a plain brown paper bag. The bag was rolled shut but Lowboy could tell what was in it. The smell was sweet and dank and unmistakable. The thing in the bag was a Jamaican beef patty.

Here we go, Lowboy thought. He felt himself gliding forward. He tried to keep his guts from making noises but there was no stopping them. His arms had gone slack and his bones cracked like pieces of kindling. The platform had begun to fill again, like a theater lobby at intermission, but he never took his eyes off the bag. I wonder if he’ll eat it all, he thought. I wonder if he’ll throw it away. The man was bald and thickheaded and his rumpled grease-smeared trench-coat ended just above his shoes. The trenchcoat matched the briefcase
perfectly. He ought to have sunglasses on, Lowboy said to himself. He looks like an unemployed spy.

The briefcase seemed heavy. What could there be inside it? The man set it down on the platform, less than a foot from the column, as if to offer him a better view. It never occurred to the man to look behind him. He’s daydreaming, Lowboy said to himself. He’s composing a poem. No wonder he got fired from Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The man unrolled the paper bag and started eating. The smell of it was everywhere by then. By the time the patty was two-thirds gone Lowboy could barely keep upright. At one point he thought the man had noticed him: he stopped in mid-swallow and his head ticked very slightly to the left. But then he was taking another bite, grunting softly as he chewed, glaring down at his fists as though they were somebody else’s. His chin glistened like buttered rubber. Lowboy stepped back against the column and let his eyes rest flatly on the ground. His stomach was spasming and turning cartwheels but the man in the trenchcoat couldn’t have cared less. His briefcase was less than an arm’s length away, blacker and more official-looking than ever. It vibrated coldly against the concrete. There was some kind of machinery inside it.

Lowboy held his breath and reached toward the briefcase. The man with the patty gave a cough, cleared his throat petulantly, then coughed a second time. Down the wrong pipe, Lowboy decided. That’s all it is. He closed his hand around the mottled snakeskin grip. It came to eager life under his touch.

“How was your weekend with Shakila, by the way?”

A second man had appeared beside the first. He was fine-boned and yellowish and he stared sleepily out at the tracks. The man with the patty had his mouth full. He held up a finger and nodded.

“Noisy,” he said at last.

The second man laughed. “You should spend your time more constructively, my brother. Chess or model airplanes. Pay-per-view.”

“It was all right, actually. Pretty nice.”

“Shakila,” the second man singsonged. “Shakila. Shakila. Shakila.”

The first man took a slow, thoughtful bite of his patty. Two or three more and it would be gone forever. Lowboy bit his lip and pulled the briefcase closer. No one on the platform seemed to notice.

“I’ll tell you something about that girl,” the second man said. “Shakila isn’t even her real name.”

Lowboy craned his neck to get a better look. The conversation seemed to harbor another message inside it, a confidential message addressed to him and him alone. A great show was being made of not seeing him crouched there against the column with his right hand on the briefcase. The not-seeing had been worked out masterfully. The man with the patty had finally finished and was wiping his fingertips one at a time on a dirty bandanna. Lowboy could easily have bitten the man on the calf. A mechanism inside the briefcase was keeping him from picking it up and running: a gyroscope or an electromagnet. A magnet, he decided. He felt the same charge pass through him that he’d felt at museum of natural history when he’d let his fingers rest on Andrew Jackson. This is what power feels like, he thought, clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from rattling. Rich people feel this way every day. They plug themselves into it like toasters.

“Want me to tell you her real name?” the second man said, looking every possible place but down at Lowboy.

“You’d tell me either way,” the first man answered, bringing the bandanna up to wipe his nose.

The second man smacked his lips. “It’s Emily.”

At the sound of that name Lowboy fell over backward and staggered to his feet and started running. The briefcase was rattling and throwing off sparks but its current was propelling him forward now, feeding into his legs and stomach, working his body by remote control. Emily, the man had said. The word seemed senseless to him, a
random assortment of everyday noises, but he knew that it was connected to the briefcase and to the feeling of power that was carrying him up the escalator and out through the turnstiles and into the late morning light. Emily. From the platform to the sidewalk he had no other idea. By the time he reached the curb it had come quietly to rest, taking root against his memory like a virus, flooding his consciousness with copies of itself.