Manhattan Nocturne (15 page)

Authors: Colin Harrison

BOOK: Manhattan Nocturne

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We strolled uptown along Park Avenue, passing the executives, the women in hats, the messengers and deliverymen and secretaries in sensible shoes.

“Here,” Caroline said, taking my arm.

I looked up at the building facade; it was a Malaysian bank, one I'd never heard of but which no doubt catered to the ever-rising number of wealthy Malaysian middlemen who work for Japanese and South Korean manufacturing companies, arranging the production of low-technology goods at Malaysia's feudal wages. We entered a marbled lobby that featured, behind glass, an immense sitting Buddha, eight feet high, millennia old. Caroline, I noticed, looked at it with appreciation. Then she identified herself to the three uniformed guards sitting at a wide console; one of them quietly picked up a phone, spoke a second, and then nodded.

“You keep money in
this
bank?” I asked.

“No.” She laughed. “I keep Simon here.”

We walked through a lobby, where she nodded to a receptionist, who then pressed a button at her desk. The doors of an elevator opened behind us. We stopped on the fourteenth floor. There Caroline repeated an account number to another receptionist. Standing to one side, I could see her face appear on the color screenâit looked strangely drained of blood. Then a uniformed guard with a holstered gun met us and escorted us past glass security doors and down a labyrinth of hallways. Once past another door, this one more obviously impenetrableâpolished steel perhaps two feet thickâwe were led by a tiny Malaysian woman along a narrow hallway of windowless, numbered doors. A turbaned gentleman and a woman wrapped in a veil were emerging from one of the doorways, and I glimpsed behind them into the small vault to see, fleetingly, what looked to be one of those life-size clay soldiers from China. The couple looked calmly past us; clearly the protocol was that no one saw anyone else. At the end of the hallway, the attendant punched in a small code on a key-pass on a door, then turned away as Caroline put in one of her own. A pinpoint green light flashed and the attendant opened the door for Caroline. The woman nodded and then left.

I did not know what to expect, but I was struck by the spareness of the room, the contents of which were exactly five things: two plain office chairs, a small table, a video-cassette player, and an immense trunk the size of the deep freezer my father had in our garage, where he kept the deer he shot each fall.

“This is something I vaguely knew about when Simon was alive but never actually saw until after he died.” Caroline pushed up the clasps on the lid of the trunk; it was spring-loaded and opened to reveal a tray of videotapes. Each one was affixed with a small white label and was numbered: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. The tapes were not in numerical order; there might have been seventy-five or a hundred.

“Which tapes should I look at?” I said.

“As many as possible.”

“Seriously?”

She looked at me, eyebrows lifted.

“That would takeâwhat, are all of these two hours long?”

“No. Most are only maybe ten, twenty minutes. Some are longer. There are a couple of much longer ones.”

“I'll do what I can.”

“You can come back and see the rest.”

She lifted the tray of tapes.

“Shall I look at them in numerical order?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It doesn't matter.”

“No order or message or anything?”

“No. Absolutely not. That wasn't his vision of things. His idea was that there was no pattern. It would have been too simplistic. He thought patterns were for cowards, actually.”

“Will you sit here and watch them with me?”

“No.”

I looked at her.

“I'm sorry. I can't watch these anymore.” Her eyes held a memory. “I've seen them all too many times. I couldn't sit through them again. It's too exhausting.”

I pulled one of the chairs up next to the trunk and started poking through the tapes.

“I'll tell the people out front you might be here awhile.”

“Okay.”

She came up to me. “Thank you, Porter.”

“This is one of the weirder moments of my life, I think?”

“Just remember that Simon was very, very unhappy all his life and that he was always searching for something, for
true
life, he wanted to capture truth. Maybe that's silly, but that's what he wanted to do. These tapes are sort of a personal collection. He chose each for something he liked. He threw out many more. We talked about it once. He was trying to assemble a collection of filmed moments. Not like a movie. Not a sequence. Just a collection.”

“Has Charlie seen these tapes?”

“Charlie? Of course not! He wouldn't understand.”

“Soâ?”

“So I'm asking you to look at them.”

“Why?”

“Well â¦” She gazed at me with her wide blue eyes, and they seemed full of answers that remembered not only her time with Simon Crowley but her life before that; she seemed to be intimating that one thing was connected to another and that all were connected to everything else, that the only way to understand it was to let her explain it to me in her own way, difficult as that might be. “I need toâI want you to see them because then I can talk about something
else
with you.”

I know enough from my work that during an interview it is sometimes more useful to indulge the evasiveness of the speaker than to challenge it. The evasive statements carve out a kind of negative space around what is being avoided. So I just nodded. Caroline leaned forward and gave me a lingering kiss next to my ear. “Can we see each other tomorrow in my apartment again?” she whispered.

I nodded yesâstupidly.

She left and the door clicked shut. The sound of it bothered me, then scared me, and after a moment I jumped up and checked the door to be sure that I had not been locked in. Then I took one tape, labeled TAPE 26, put it into the machine, and hit play.

TAPE 26

[Dark shapes, sound of a truck engine.]

First voice: â¦ Gulf Stream, man, boat was maybe fifty feet long.

Second voice: What do you got on one of those numbersâsix chairs?

First voice: Yeah, two down front in the back, couple on the sides. [Engine is louder. Sunlight flashes onto the scene to reveal a huge metal lip of some sort; beyond it is a continuous stream of streetbed, potholes. The truck can be heard to shift gears, brakes screeching. Far-off traffic, sirens. The truck stops. A man dressed in a garbageman's uniform appears, dragging a large can; in go bags of garbage, shoes, loose magazines; then another man, with another can, and then the first with another; after half a dozen cans
the roadway beyond the metal lip blurs for ten seconds, then the screech of brakes; the men appear, rhythmically, dumping in garbage cans, one after another: trash, clothes, wet paper bags, a few bottles, a broken radio, newspapers that should be recycled, bags, bags, bags, an old computer monitor, some children's toys, magazines, Styrofoam packaging, papers â¦ ] Saw a beautiful run out there, actually.

Second voice: What were they?

First voice: Yellowfins, around thirty pounds. I went up on deck, it was beautiful â¦ [Truck lurches forward again; men bring more cans, dumping in one after another, breathing a bit with the effort, the sun now in their faces. Beneath their heavy green shirts are torsos thick in the shoulders and arms. When the light flashes across the men's faces, they appear to be older than one might expect, given the considerable effort of lifting the heavy cans.]

First voice: So I was up there and we saw them. Incredible. The water was blue, so blue, you know, and then the captain calls out, “Here they come,” and I'm up there on deck and I see this flashing â¦ these shapes, and they're going fast, flashing, like, maybe ten feet under the surface, and it's the most beautiful thing I ever saw. [Truck lurches forward again. The men work steadily, pausing only to pull the lever that activates the digestive compactor of the garbage truck. And then more societal excrement: bags, broken ceiling tiles, a bicycle, cat litter, garbage bags, ripped and spilling open to reveal eggshells and coffee rinds and pork chop bones and fashion magazines and cigarette butts and a woman's slip, dirty and translucent and beguiling as it momentarily floats atop a froth of garbage.] It was something I was never going to forget, them just coming at me like that, like a couple hundred of them.

Second voice: Yeah.

First voice: Some kind of beautiful thing, I'm telling
you. [The garbage truck lurches forward again, screeches to a stop, and the men resume their work. This continues for about twenty minutes. They say nothing to each other. The tape ends.]

I put another one in.

TAPE 32

[The screen shows the backseat of a large car, a limousine. It is night. The radio is playing, faintly. The bottom half of the side window is visible. The car is moving through traffic, passing taxis, the lights of storefronts, people on the streets in winter coats. It is New York City.]

First voice: It's on already, I just hit the button.

Second voice: You're a very fucked-up guy, you know that? [The back of a head, close to the camera. Camera tries to focus automatically on dark hair. Head moves, camera refocuses.]

First voice: Give me that thing, man.

Second voice: I drink one more drop I'ma be sick, I'll just shoot it.

First voice: Just open the window 'fore you do.

Second voice: I'll be too gone do it.

First voice: Naw.

Second voice: Shit.

First voice: Ask Max or whateverz name a go overt Tenth Avenue.

Second voice: I'm not ready.

First voice: Just tell Max.

Second voice: He'll think we're bunch of fucking perverts.

First voice: He's getting paid.

Second voice: Max! Tenth Avenue, Forty-sixth Street! [A sound.]

First voice: What'd he say?

Second voice: He said sure.

First voice: He said Bush is going to get reelected.

Second voice: Fuck you.

First voice: Jesus, I feel great, I feel like my fucking head is mag-lev.

Second voice: Mag-lev?

First voice: Magnetic-levitation, man. The Japanese train is going fucking two hundred miles a hour and it's not touching anything, going above the rails. Second voice: We can't be doing this.

First voice: Too high to die, man.

Second voice: Come on, what the fuck.

First voice: We're almost there, look! There's one. Tell Max slow down. [Sound. Car is moving more slowly.] There's one.

Second voice: God, no!

First voice: She wasn't so bad!

Second voice: She was huge!

First voice: There!

Second voice: No!

First voice: Yeah!

Second: Max, stop it here! Stop it here! [Face in the window, blonde girl with bad teeth.]

Girl: Hi, fellas.

First voice: Hi to you.

Girl: What's happening tonight? It's cold and I'm all lonely out here.

First voice: We're sorta lonely in here.

Girl: Looks like you have, like, a whole bar.

Second voice: Yeah, comes with the car.

Girl: That's great.

First voice: Billy, she for you? [Pause. Cars pass outside.]

Billy: Open the door. Let me get a look. [Door opens. Girl pretends to dance, moving her hips back and forth, clawing her short dress upward.]

First voice: Billy?

Girl: Round the world is gonna be one-fifty.

Billy: You're too ugly, spend that kind of money.

First voice: She's not ugly. Plain, perhaps. Nondescript. Generic. A certain utilitarianâ

Girl: What's he saying?

Billy: You sound like you're interested, my man.

First voice: I could be intâressed. I could be very int'ressed. But then again, you're buying. [The girl sits in the car, one leg in, one leg out.]

Billy: Closa door, it's cold.

Girl: I could do you both, if that'sâ

First voice: I'm not into that shit. I seen Billy naked and it's no treat.

Billy: Fuck you, Simon.

Girl [pulling up her dress]: Which of you gentlemenâ

Billy : It's gonna be him, but I'm paying. So we agreeâ

Girl: I said one-fifty for round the world.

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