The Sky Below (11 page)

The only people talking were two pale, limpid guys in their twenties with pierced tongues and torn, low-slung, skinny jeans, slouching by the dark door at the end of the car. One of them was saying, “. . . from the gym . . . an ostrich.” I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the car's darkened windows, superimposed over a bit of shaggy tunnel wall. In the window, I looked to myself like a watercolor, like you could put your hand right through me.
Gabriel, thirty-seven, somewhere underneath the East River.
A fairly good-looking guy with sparky, longish hair in a suit jacket and backpack, no briefcase, but wearing a brown tie with black stripes that his father might have worn, if he had had a father. Though I'd never seen my father in a tie. He must have been about the age I was now when he walked out on us. Where did he go? Was the river above me still gold, or had it turned to black?

As the train sat suspended underground, I wondered, just for a heartbeat, what was going to become of me. It occurred to me that I couldn't exactly say how all my time in New York had gone by so far. All I knew was that every day I was trying. Looking up at the plucky, unsinkable
Stolen
girls in their stars, though, I wondered if maybe I had drifted. Rallying, I thought that my girl May had probably caught glimpses of herself, too, in windows like this one. May had ridden these trains. She had been a young woman, then an old one, then quite an old one, getting smaller and smaller in these dark tunnels. She had lugged her life around these subway cars like all of us, like the
woman with the pink pashmina shawl, like the baby with his florid baby dreams, like the guys with their ostrich. She had held her sequined soldier's hat in a box on her lap on the way to Radio City. May would have drawn herself up to her full five feet. Shoulders back. Chin up. March. I squared my shoulders and reminded myself that there was still time, plenty of time, everything would turn out fine, I had a lot going for me. It wasn't like I lived in the city of the dead. I just worked there, for now. The train shuddered and lurched on.

I got off at Clark Street and came up through the St. George Hotel. It was actually condos, but the sign remained, as if the hotel were a shell, a portal. I went up through the St. George Hotel that wasn't a hotel anymore, and there I was on the other side, in the land of the living. The sun, I saw with relief, hadn't set yet. From Clark Street I could just about see the river, but more important, I could feel it. I could see the big sky over the East River at the end of the leafy block, and the way the street seemed to bend imperceptibly toward that expanse. The people on the street looked brighter because of the light from the big sky. The fall afternoon was warm. I took off my jacket and loosened my tie.

On Clark Street, birds were singing, but otherwise the block had the muffled, languorous feeling you get in Manhattan only at four in the morning. It was all brownstones or Victorians on this stretch. The light was a strong amber that gave all the colors extra depth, as if they were made of thick oil paint. A heavyset woman with curly gray and blond hair, changing a light bulb in the black iron lamp in her yard, smiled at me as I walked by. I ambled along, down Henry Street. I passed a yellow house, a blue house, a gray house, all with stoops. The people on the stoops of the yellow house and the blue house next door to it were laughing together, their front doors open to catch the last of the season's warmth. A man held a plump dachshund, standing on its hind legs, in his lap, one hand on
the dachshund's round belly. The toenails of one of the women were painted a strong, shiny red. A hot-pink tricycle with pink and purple streamers dangling from the handlebars sat by itself in the middle of the sidewalk.

I passed a small, nondescript alley incongruously called Love Lane, then turned down Pineapple Street. It was so fanciful, like something out of a children's book.
And they all lived happily ever after on Pineapple Street.
It was even quieter on Pineapple Street than on Clark Street; it was still as a mews. Halfway down Pineapple Street, I stopped to have a smoke. I noticed that there was a scaly red patch, about the size of a quarter, in the crook of my right arm. It itched. I scratched it. Tapping out a cigarette, I glanced, as if casually, at the house across the street. My house. For one irrational moment, I was gripped by anxiety, but then there it was, as always. My house.

The house wasn't markedly different from the others of its kind on Hicks Street or Joralemon Street or Cranberry Street, or any of the others in Brooklyn Heights, or Park Slope, or Cobble Hill. It wasn't a brownstone. It was wood-frame, three stories tall, faintly—very faintly—Victorian. It was painted green. There were houses that were grander, more embellished, stranger. The house, in fact, was far from perfect. It was too skinny. It slanted a bit to one side; its porch looked tenuous, scruffy. On top of the roof was a lacy widow's walk, painted gray. The peak of a skylight was just visible on the roof as well. There was a section missing on the widow's walk (did a widow plunge over the edge?) that had been badly filled in with an unpainted two-by-four—it looked like a wooden leg. Under the widow's walk, on the third story, there was a row of windows that were shorter than the windows on the first and second floors; just below the roofline, between two of the short windows, was a round, black metal plate with the raised shape of an anchor, and below the anchor, also raised, was the date 1853. In front of the house on Pineapple Street was a
wrought-iron gate, and around the gate twined a vine of blue flowers, just like on Tinker's Way in Bishop. That gate—if the blue flowers twined around it had actually spoken when I first spotted them a few years back, on my way to a yard sale for box treasure, they couldn't have called my name more loudly.
Old friend,
they said.
Old friend.

A nice African-American family lived in that house. A mother with long dreadlocks, a square-faced father, and a tawny girl of seven or eight with loosely kinky brownish-blackish hair and blue eyes. The little girl was generally dressed in many colors, many layers; her expression tended toward the grave. It had always been that way, even when she was a toddler. She was growing up so fast. The name of the family was Fisher, and, as if in homage to this name, on the heavy green door was a brass knocker in the shape of a fish, tail up. The garden in front of the house was modest: a few pansies, a bit of purplish ground cover. As I say, the house was far from perfect, and apart from its imperfections it was fairly ordinary. Its charm—which was almost certainly apparent only to me—lay in the indefinably insouciant way it sat on its little plot of ground, the subtly pleasing space between the windows, the particular broadness of the front steps. It had a soul. I loved that house. I just did. Seeing it was like seeing my own face in the mirror: familiar, inevitable, flawed, reassuring, sublime. The old glass in the parlor floor windows looked like still lakes. I couldn't believe they hadn't replaced that two-by-four. Maybe the square-faced father had been busy at the office.

No matter. I breathed in the umber air on Pineapple Street, breathed it in deeply. Clearly, the Fishers weren't home right now, but they would be home soon. They would be making dinner, telling one another about their day, watching a little television. The father would be thinking, for the hundredth time,
I really need to fix that spot on the widow's walk. Saturday.
The mother would be asking the daughter if she'd done her
homework. The daughter would be skipping in the living room. (She would skip with a serious expression.) I was quite respectful toward the Fishers; I had never crossed the street, but always stayed, invisible hat in hand, leaning against the lamppost, smoking just one cigarette, getting one good, long hit of the house. On this Tuesday, feeling infinitely better at the sight of it, I finished my cigarette, stubbed it out on the curb, and turned away.

 

7:03.
Back at the half-empty office, I wrote that May was crowned Miss Rockette of 1939 and a few other highlights and sent the obit off to copy.
Click.
The Miss Rockette part and several of the other highlights weren't true, but the fact checker—we had only one, cost cuts, and we weren't so heavy on facts anyway—was usually so tweaked on triple espressos from the Starbucks downstairs that he confirmed everything in a manic rush to get through as many stories as he could in the shortest possible time. He never questioned any of my extra sentences, overwhelmed as he always was with anxiety about closing on time, though why he thought that it mattered if we closed on time, or even existed, was beyond me. We all had ways of convincing ourselves that the paper wasn't a fraud, that what we did was necessary, that we weren't about to be erased altogether; adding a few extra medals here and there was mine.

 

Sometimes I wished those medals, like the Cowardly Lion's badge of courage, could convince me that I still cared. Sometimes when I walked past the frozen bull, I remembered the three whirlwinds that had rushed up the creek toward me and filled my ears, I remembered my father, I remembered the City rising from the living room floor in Bishop. Sometimes there was a whisper, a rustling of leaves, when I was in my apartment looking at what I called my art wall. I'd never been able to
afford separate studio space, so when Caroline moved out eleven years ago, I ripped out the shitty cabinets on what I could see was a pretty good, pretty big wall in the ratty kitchen. I went to the lumber yard on Avenue D and got eight six-foot-long pieces of plywood, brackets, runners, thick screws, and plastic anchors. I hung the eight shelves, floor to ceiling. On the shelves I put my precious Belgian nails, my tiny jars of paint, my hammer and cracked screwdriver and needle-nose pliers, my stash of manzanita, wire and glue, and all sorts of treasure.

The city, I had discovered right away, abounded in treasure. The streets were paved with it. On the upper shelves, the ones I couldn't reach without a ladder, I put the boxes I had finished. They made the kitchen look like a curiosity shop or an apothecary. On the floor, underneath the first shelf, went issues of
Artforum
and
Art in America,
catalogs from shows I'd liked, my art history textbooks, and a few issues of
Butt
magazine and
Bound and Gagged.
I bought four huge green plastic storage bins and stacked my random collection of dishes and silverware, cereal and spices, in them. I labeled the lids.

My wall was fantastic, and I never failed to feel a glow when I regarded it. It was a really cool wall, my art wall, and it had only improved over time. Sarah thought so, too. It looked like a vertical archaeological dig. On the very top shelf were my Pineapple Street boxes: Pineapple Street in summer, Pineapple Street in winter, Janos and I at the door of the house on Pineapple Street, carrying enormous fish in our arms: these boxes were sentimental, secret, true. I made them rarely.

Sometimes there was more than a whisper in the shadow of the art wall. A week before the time of which I'm writing, for instance, I called in sick to work one day—I felt really tired. I went to the bathroom and rubbed in a good handful of Bedhead Manipulator until I got my hair the way I wanted it, which made me feel more awake. I went to the kitchen, took down my tools and the peculiar figurine I'd been
attempting to whittle for months. My whittling energy felt incredibly strong. Today I might finally be able to get the figurine's strange face right. I had already tossed a dozen bad versions of her into the scrap box. I turned on my father's radio, sat down at the kitchen table, and set to work, shaping her large jaw line with my best, smallest knife. My plan was to make her blue with big, curving, bluer horns, like rams' horns, on her head. Sort of like Integrity, or maybe it was Mining. I might whittle her a deer for a companion. The deer would be blue, too. I had just invented this great thing, pagan realism. No one had ever done that before. It would be my signature. I dug into the wood with the knife edge, turning it just so, delicately. At last the wood responded. It gave me a yielding, exact curve, another. I unearthed the left side of her jaw line, the beginning of the point of her chin. I felt her small, solid weight in my hand.

I was happy, whittling and listening to Nirvana. I had a vague urge to have a wank, but I wanted to finish the line that was flowing so well, like reeling in a big fish. Her chin pointed. Luck ran from my shoulders to my fingertips, guiding the knife effortlessly. It was the right thing to do, calling in sick. And I did feel sick, in a way. I was about to have a fever. In my feverishness, though, I had grace. This one, the blue goddess, might even get me into a juried show in Queens that Sarah and I were entering. I knew what the blue figurine's box was going to be, and her vibe alone was already amazing. I sashayed to the right side of her jaw line. Then the knife slipped, cutting deep and clean into my forefinger. Blood everywhere, and the pain came, a sickening throb. Motherfucker. I ran to the kitchen sink and turned on the cold water, which turned red, then pink, then red again. I wrapped my finger in a dishrag and sat down heavily in the kitchen chair, feeling slightly nauseated. The rag soaked through. Fuck. Fuck.

Three hours, one shot of Novocain, one tetanus shot, six stitches, and two extra-strength Tylenols later, I sat in a plastic
bucket seat in the emergency room of St. Vincent's while Janos asked questions about the discharge instructions. I looked at my hand with its one grotesquely large forefinger wrapped in gauze. I couldn't feel my fingers or my palm. Sensation, uneasily, began at my wrist. Maybe my hand was paralyzed and I could quit my stupid job. I opened and closed my other hand, pinched it below my pinky. It felt. Good, I thought; I have one, anyway. My wanking hand, luckily. I wiggled my toes in my shoes, stretched my neck. I swallowed a few times. All systems go. I stayed at Janos's that night, went obediently in my tie to work the next day (I was sick, I was injured, after all).