Monkey in the Middle

for Miriam Joseph
,

constant companion

One

L
eonard Carter is overwhelmed at first, a matter of too much input. Evergreen branches wound with Christmas-red ribbon form a series of receding arches that run the length of the floor. Red, white, pink and yellow poinsettias crowd the top of every kiosk. A Christmas tree of red poinsettias rises twenty feet to the ceiling; its flaming leaves match the color of the ribbon exactly. Merchandise glitters on either side of the long aisle, display cases piled with jewelry, leather handbags on racks, perfume and cosmetics. Along a center beam, massive light fixtures telescope from the ceiling. They beckon to Carter like points on a treasure map, like the song pouring from hidden speakers at deafening volume. Burl Ives doing
Holly Jolly Christmas
.

A full minute passes before Carter becomes aware of the swarm buzzing around him, of the goggle-eyed shoppers who brush against his shoulders as they pass. He tries to laugh, but fails. Then he cops to the reality: he was so focused on the mark that he walked through the Sixth Avenue entrance to Macy's, five days before Christmas, as though anticipating an empty room. This is not something he can toss off with a laugh.

The steady drone of conversation and the relentless music, along with the blended odors of perfume and powder and bodies sweating beneath heavy coats, flood Carter's awareness, as physical as onrushing surf. For a moment, Carter thinks that he's the object of the crowd's nervous chatter, a Frankenstein to their peasant mob.

‘You gonna just fuckin' stand there?'

Carter turns to find a Latino woman pushing a stroller. For the length of a thought, he sees, as vividly as in a dream, the blade of a knife slicing across her throat. Then he steps to the side, turning his face away.

‘Sorry.'

The encounter sobers Leonard Carter. He asks himself, What did you expect? But then he puts a name to it: slippage. That's what he calls his lapse. Slippage. And not for the first time.

Carter is wearing a gray fedora with a little feather in its band. Without raising his head, he peers from beneath the hat's four-inch brim. The store's decorations intrigue him, especially the receding arches, which are not wrapped with ribbon as he'd originally thought, but covered with bows so cleverly placed they seem to form a perfect spiral. And now that he's really looking, he finds Christmas ornaments and tiny Christmas lights, and he notices that the curve of each arch is virtually identical to all the others.

Precision has always appealed to Carter, from his earliest days. He believes there's a right way to do things. Finding it? Maybe that's a horse of a different color. Maybe you can search for your entire life and never find the right way. That doesn't mean it isn't out there.

Sometimes, Carter believes that efficiency is a form of worship. This is never more true than when he handles weapons. Carter's ability to field-strip his rifle, to lay out the parts exactly as the sergeant instructed, won him nominations, to the Army Rangers, and then to the super-secret Delta Force. Carter had gone along with the program, but not because he was ambitious. The simple truth was that the army had it right and there was no reason to improvise. The way Carter arranged the various components when he disassembled his weapon, each element fell to hand exactly as needed when the time came to put it back together. His fingers seemed to move by themselves, he no more than a neutral observer.

Suddenly, Carter realizes that he's lost sight of the mark. More slippage. But this time he smiles to himself. There's no rush. If not today, tomorrow.

Swept along by the crowds, Carter meanders into a side aisle. Here, the evergreen boughs are penetrated by thousands of Christmas lights. The lights don't follow a rigid pattern, yet their careful placement is obvious. There are no bare spots and no clusters. Same for the ornaments. All bear testimony to a careful hand.

A few yards ahead, a woman sits on a stool before a cosmetics counter, a white towel covering her shoulders. The woman is just a step short of elderly and her bony face is well lined. Carter wonders what she hopes to accomplish. Simple dignity, that would be her best bet. Meanwhile, the splotches of rouge applied to her cheeks by a beautician young enough to be her grandchild, applied over a layer of powder as thick and stiff as porcelain, are just a shade less garish than the poinsettia leaves.

‘I don't know . . . What do you think? Is it too much?'

The beautician gives her platinum blonde hair a professional shake. She cocks her head, closes one blue eye, then nods wisely.

‘You go for it, girl.'

As much as possible, Carter avoids physical contact with strangers, a matter of instinct. But that's not possible here. The shoppers, adults and children alike, wander as if in a trance, lurching right and left, stopping dead in their tracks, heads swiveling like radar discs sweeping a horizon. Carter has to force his way into the center aisle, another affront. Civility is what makes the world go round, especially in cities as insanely crowded as New York. What he now observes is a form of anarchy.

‘Excuse me,' Carter says to an obese man wearing a bomber jacket that proclaims ‘BLUE DEVILS RULE'. The man doesn't respond and Carter's first instinct is to drive his fist into the man's kidney. He is about to do so when he spots the mark thirty feet away.

Ashamed, Carter jams his clenched fist into his pocket. For a moment, he'd forgotten all about the mark, or even why he was in Macy's in the first place. More slippage.

Heh-heh.

Carter moves closer to a display case. Diamonds illuminated by pinpoint lights flash a cold fire. He draws a breath through his nose, feels it slither down the back of his throat and into his lungs, warm and fragrant. He's home now.

The mark is examining women's watches, one after another. The open boxes on the counter reveal labels: Bulova, Movado, ESQ Swiss, Seiko. Carter resists an urge to straighten the boxes, to arrange them in a line with the center box slightly forward. He drops to one knee and feigns interest in a two carat engagement ring.

Carter knows the mark, whose name is Anthony Maguire, fairly well. He has a wife, three children, a legit business (Empire Construction), and a bookmaking operation run from a bar on Northern Boulevard in Roslyn. High school educated, Maguire is the proud owner of season tickets to all New York Giants' home games, a man who eats hamburgers seated at the bar, a man who likes to talk. Even now, his lips move rapidly as he chats up the clerk, a black girl less than half his age. Six and a half feet tall, he makes for an imposing figure, leaning across the counter, near enough for the girl to feel his breath against her forehead. And that's another thing about Anthony Maguire. Though he supports a wife, three children, his aging mother and a full-time mistress named Zenia, he comes on to every woman who crosses his path.

Carter straightens. He wills himself to become part of the scene, an automaton among automatons, pre-programmed to observe an elaborate, ongoing ritual. A lifetime before, in Africa during the worst-of-the-worst, Ranan Barad described the Nataraja dance of the Hindu god Shiva. All of creation and all of destruction, Ranan explained, is contained in this dance: the crackling fire, the Milky Way, bright enough in the African sky to be itself a god. Even the men who would hack them to death are in this dance. Even the amphetamines that keep them awake and alive.

The mark shakes his head, then turns and takes a step toward Carter. His coat and jacket are open, his gut protruding. Carter pulls the dagger from its sheath at his belt. He balances the hilt on the tips of his fingers, leaving the blade to rest against his forearm. The mark's gait is noticeably splay-footed and he walks with his shoulders back, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. All to the good.

Carter focuses on a single polka dot on the mark's tie. As he moves to the man's right, then comes forward, he imagines the precise arc which will carry the dagger to this point, the rotation of his shoulder, his wrist flipping out to expose the blade (but only for an instant), his elbow held as close to his ribs as possible.

His body repeats the imagined sequence at the very last moment. Just as he and the mark are about to pass, the dagger's blade sstrikes a point an inch below the mark's sternum, driving through a thick layer of fat, through the muscles of the diaphragm, into the major blood vessels beneath.

There is no blood, and there won't be until the knife is pulled out.

The mark grunts when the knife pierces his flesh, but makes no other sound. His diaphragm is temporarily paralyzed and he can neither draw nor expel breath. An instant before he crashes to the floor, he seizes the dagger's grip with both hands, effectively concealing its existence.

The shoppers closest to him instinctively recoil, as though he carries some terrible and contagious disease. But they don't scatter. Instead, suddenly curious, they form a circle around him, nobody making a move until a security guard rushes up.

‘Are you all right, sir?' the man asks just as the mark yanks the dagger out. ‘Are you all right?'

A river of blood answers his question.

Two

C
arter skips the dramatics. His business completed, he walks, supremely casual, down the aisle, through Macy's Seventh Avenue addition, finally out on to the street. More crowds, more sleep-walking tourists wobbling along the sidewalk like drunks in a silent movie. A Salvation Army Santa – a black man with the bony face of an Abe Lincoln – tolls a bell and mutters Merry Christmas over and over again. His eyes are fixed on some distant shore and his voice is without inflection. His bell rises and falls, regular as a metronome:
da-ding . . . da-ding . . . da-ding . . . da-ding
. Carter's dollar, tossed into his red kettle, elicits no response.

Carter rides the 1 Train up to Columbus Circle, then walks the few blocks to the Orchid Hotel where he finds a men's room on the lobby floor. Inside a stall, he removes the wig and the false beard he wears, tossing them, along with his fedora, into a white garbage bag taken from his coat pocket. A few minutes later, he dumps the bag into a trash can on Sixty-Fourth Street, a can standing at the curb, ready for pick-up. Finally, Carter hails a cab.