Ten Thousand Saints (19 page)

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

Who was at bat? He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. “What do you want with Jude, anyway?”

“I need to talk to both of them. I really want to talk to them.”

“You whine about meeting my kids, and then when one of them finally materializes, you disappear.”

“I’ve just been busy. You
told
me to apply myself. I’ve had a lot going on!”

“Wait, what are you doing home on a weekday?”

“Who . . . home?”

“What? Say it again.”

“ALL RIGHT, FINE. I’m on my mom’s phone. I wasn’t feeling well, so I took the train home.”

“Aren’t you not supposed to do that?”

“You wrote a note, saying you were taking me on a trip.”

“That was nice of me.”

“Les,” said Eliza through a burst of static, “ . . . tell you anything, right?”

“Sure, honey.”

Then a kid’s voice, not Eliza’s, said, “ . . . not fair, it’s totally not fair.”

“Quit your whining, man,” said Les, eyeing the hot dogs across the room, surely gone cold, as the Twins performed a double play that was truly not fair, and Eliza’s voice danced inextricably with the ghost of a stranger’s, their words sometimes nearly making a sort of sense.

“JUST TELL HIM TO CALL ME,” said Eliza, and Les hung up.

T
he doorman was expecting them. They rose in the mirrored elevator, Jude’s stomach dropping through the floor. Inside the apartment, a vacuum cleaner was running, and they had to ring the bell several times before a small, dusky-skinned woman answered the door. She was wearing a sports bra and leggings, between which, bisecting a lumpy stomach, ran a scar the same purple as the polish on her fingers and toes. A red spot hovered just above her eyes. “Thank goodness,” she said. “She been cry and cry.” Through a living room that looked like a wing of the White House, down a hallway hung with the frowning visages of Eastern Europeans, the woman led them to Eliza’s room, opening the door without knocking. “Two boys in your room okay?” she said, but then left, closing the door behind her. A moment later the vacuum cleaner started up again.

Jude had never been in any girl’s room but his sister’s, but Eliza’s looked just as he would have expected one to. A Beastie Boys poster hung on the rose-papered wall, and a pair of ballet slippers was slung over the back of a rocking chair, in which sat a family of stuffed bears, one wearing a Yankees cap. On the dresser was a cluster of photographs: a man who was not Les with a dark-haired baby swathed in his arms; a long-locked Eliza aloft in a bat mitzvah chair. In the wicker wastebasket beside the bed were clouds of Kleenex and four or five empty Yoo-hoo bottles, and in the double bed, which was pink and ruffled and plump with pillows, Eliza lay with the covers pulled up to her chin. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

He had known, as soon as his father had relayed the message, that it was about Teddy. There was no other reason for Eliza to summon them to her mother’s apartment. “Just come over,” she’d said, “and you’ll see.” On the silent train uptown, Jude felt a calm settle over him. Not because he looked forward to whatever revelation Eliza had in store, but because he welcomed the relief of pressure. It was as though Johnny and Jude had been engaged in a staring contest, each daring the other to speak Teddy’s name first, and even though it meant he would lose, Jude was desperate to blink.

“What happened to your hair?” Her voice was hoarse, her eyes and nose red.

Jude and Johnny both put a hand to their heads. “I cut it,” Jude said.

“Nice sling.” It wasn’t a cast, but Jude had never broken a bone before, so he had people sign it. Johnny, Les, Rooster, a nurse named LaCarol, the couple who owned the Smoke Sho. “There should be a marker in my desk drawer.” Johnny retrieved the marker and Jude sat on the edge of the bed while she found a blank space to print her name in capital letters. “Does it hurt?”

“Not really. When I change the bandages. Mostly it itches. This guy saved my life,” he said, slapping Johnny hard on the back.

“Stop, drop, and roll,” Johnny explained.

“What happened, exactly?”

Jude could sense she was stalling, but he didn’t mind stalling with her. “These women carry around these plates of candles. You’re supposed to wave your hands through the fire and over your head”—he imitated with his free hand, as though washing his hair—“but I held my hand in there too long and it got my sleeve. I was tripping on shrooms.”

He had confessed this to Johnny, who had not been surprised, as well as to the receptionist, the doctor, and LaCarol, who had swaddled him in ointment and bandages. No one arrested him, no one blinked. But it had felt good to come clean under those penetrating hospital lights.
Last time I do that,
he’d told the nurse, loud enough for Johnny to hear.

On a white television with a built-in VCR, a soap opera was unfolding. Jude and Johnny watched it for a moment. They looked at each other, then at Eliza.

“What’d you want to tell us?” Johnny finally asked.

Eliza muted the television, but she kept her eyes on the screen. “Well, two things. And the first is very bad. You’ll want to kill me, probably.”

Jude and Johnny did not dispute this. Johnny stood in the middle of the room; Jude sat on the bed.

“Damn, I’m
starving,
” she said. “I don’t know when’s the last time I ate.”

When they said nothing, made no move to cajole her, she sighed. She looked as though she had been in this bed for a long time. Jude smelled the familiar sour-milk smell of body and bedsheet.

He said, “You’re the one who gave Teddy the coke.”

In the other room, something expensive collided with the floor. The vacuum cleaner squealed, purred, and died. Slowly, nearly undetectably, Eliza nodded. Jude looked at Johnny: his face registered nothing.

“I’ve stopped using it, though. Not right away, but I’ve stopped. As soon as I knew for sure. You don’t even have to say anything, because I
know
. I’m already being punished.” She was sniffling repeatedly. “I didn’t want to stop but I stopped! That must mean something, right?”

She reached for her bottle of Yoo-hoo and took a ravenous gulp, spilling the milk down her chin, down her throat, following the silver chain into her cleavage. It was a little girl’s nightgown, white, cotton; at the neckline was a bow with a pearl in the center. Maybe it was that pearl, maybe it was just seeing her again, maybe it was the consolation of having an accomplice, but even before she started to cry, Jude felt an empathetic loosening in his own chest. Johnny sat down beside Jude, and they dabbed her gingerly with tissues, mopping up chocolate milk and tears. She covered her face with her hands, talking into them as she cried.

“What are you saying?” Johnny said. “What’s she saying?” he asked Jude.

“All I want is Yoo-hoo!” she yelled, removing her hands. “Why does it have to be Yoo-hoo? Why can’t I crave something that won’t make me fat? And I don’t have any
friends
!”

“I don’t think it’ll make you
fat,
necessarily,” said Jude helplessly, inspecting the label.

“I feel enormous. I’m enormous.”

“You’re not enormous,” Jude said.

“I’ve been
studying
. I got a ninety-nine on my British Lit midterm!”

“Eliza, is there something else?” said Johnny. “Just tell us.”

“I didn’t think it would show this quickly,” she whispered, very still now, her eyes very wet. “It was practically overnight.” She pushed back the covers and lifted her nightgown enough to reveal her belly. She stared down at it, her hair veiling her face. It looked like his sister’s belly, only plumper. Eliza’s belly button was stretched wide.

“You can’t tell?” Eliza asked.

Jude and Johnny both began to stand. Then they lowered themselves again. Jude thought of Ingrid Donahoe. He thought of his birth mother.

“You’re not . . . ?” Johnny said.

Eliza covered her belly.

“Jeezum Crow,” Jude whispered.

Later, Jude and Johnny would admit that they’d thought the same thing. Jude had looked at Johnny, and Johnny had looked at Jude, and for a moment each was certain that the other was the father. And then as quickly as this thought had appeared, before Eliza could withdraw from her nightgown the subway token, dangling from her necklace among the other charms like a hypnotist’s watch, another thought, awful, miraculous, displaced it.

Nine

T
he furnace ticked, then hammered, then moaned, then ticked. From the street, the metallic thud of a Dumpster lid, a distant horn. Les, on the futon below, snored through it. Jude was so distracted by his thoughts that the sounds seemed to visit from someone else’s dream.

One-armed, he climbed down from the loft, wrestled on jeans and shoes and sling, gathered skateboard and watch and keys in the dark. By the glow of his father’s barbecue lighter, he found the slim black case under the kitchen sink. In it, blank-faced as a power drill, sleeping on its side on a bed of eggshell foam, lay McQueen. Jude slipped it into the pocket of his jacket and left his father alone with the furnace.

In the park, a boom box was blasting Warzone:

Don’t forget the struggle

Don’t forget the streets

He did not intend or wish to put the pistol to use as he coasted across St. Mark’s, along the lightless Avenues A, B, C, but he was glad for its leaden company. The shadowed figures he passed did not disturb him. No light showed at the bottom of Johnny’s door. Jude knocked anyway. No answer. He unlocked the padlock with the key Johnny had given him, hauled the door open, and turned on the light.

Blinking at the brightness, the three cats—Montezuma, Genghis, Tarzan—inspected him from their various perches. Jude smelled curry and the carbon whiff of cat litter. On a dish towel on the kitchenette counter, a single bowl and spoon lay drying. On the card table was a plastic laundry basket, and inside it, a block of bleached white T-shirts, crisp as a stack of paper.

Johnny’s skateboard was not by the door. He had told Jude he was going to bed early, that he had a headache, but Jude should not have been surprised that Johnny, too, had been unable to sleep. He was probably skating the city, trying to exhaust himself. “Well, that’s interesting,” he’d said on the train on the way downtown that afternoon.

Jude had said nothing.

“You didn’t know? About the two of them?”

Jude sat down on the couch. He propped a foot on each of the upturned record crates. Beside him, on top of a sketch pad, lay a well-thumbed paperback.
The Laws of Manu
. On the cover was a painting of a bejeweled god, not Krishna, four-armed, two-faced, like a conjoined pair of one-eyed jacks. Jude opened it to the place where a blank envelope marked a page.

79. A twice-born man who (daily) repeats those three one thousand times outside (the village), will be freed after a month even from great guilt, as a snake from its slough.

“Those three what?” Jude asked Tarzan, who was polishing his whiskered cheek on Jude’s knee. He would like to find those three things so he could repeat them. He flipped through the book. In another chapter, several passages were underlined in blue ink:

59. . . . let him restrain his senses, if they are attracted by sensual objects.

60. By the restraint of his senses . . . by the abstention from injuring the creatures, he becomes fit for immortality. . . .

62. On the separation from their dear ones, on their union with hated men. . . .

63. On the departure of the individual soul from this body and its new birth in (another) womb, and on its wanderings through ten thousand millions of existences . . .

Jude closed the book and closed his eyes. It was the longest string of words he had read in a while, and their shapes swam behind his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, he looked down at his mummied arm, the mitt of his hand, the blue sling busy with signatures. ELIZA. He slipped off the sling and unwound the bandage. It had been a nightly ritual for the last three weeks, and he decided he was finished. Healed. A sickle-shaped scab sliced across his forearm, and his palm was rough with scar tissue. He held up his hand, wiggled his fingers. He was supposed to see an occupational therapist twice a week, but fuck it: the doctor said he’d play the guitar again.

Johnny had been surprised the following Sunday when Jude wanted to return to the temple, but they had accepted him back without question; most of the devotees hadn’t even noticed the fire that night. During the Vedic lecture, he believed he saw the priest nod at him. Devotion to Krishna—renouncing worldly possessions, abstaining from alcohol and drugs and meat, chanting the names of god, working only for him—was the way to end the cycle of death and birth, to cast off the guilt (this, like
The Laws of Manu,
was the word he’d used) of the material world. Jude wanted to be devoted. He had never been this clean before, and he only wanted to be cleaner.