Next time would be better. He'd liked her, she was sure. He'd taken a while but he'd responded. She felt good about it, even happy.
The cab flew down Fifth Avenue, the lights of midtown pinwheeling past, and she could tell that the driver was surprised where she was going, considering where he'd picked her up. She asked him to stop at the corner of East Fourth Street, where she got out and picked up some groceries at the all-night deli. A minute later, inside her doorway, she found her key and then sleepily climbed the steps.
She reached her floor carrying the groceries and glanced down the hallway-her door was open. She stopped. All the doors to the other rooms were shut; behind one she could hear reedy Indian music and maybe smell the drift of pot, but the hallway felt empty, desolate. No one had noticed she was standing there, just as apparently no one had noticed that someone had opened her locked door. Who was in there?
She took one more step. Maybe it would be better to go back to find the landlady. But Mrs. Sanders was an old woman with cat food in her ear. She took two more steps, heard nothing. If someone was waiting for her, he'd be standing silently. She pulled a glass jar of tomato sauce out of the bag to throw. She slipped off her shoes and slid down the hallway.
All the lights in her room were on. She pushed at the door. Inside-her bed, her bureau. They'd poked around but not torn it up. The boxes of papers belonging to Melissa Williams were untouched.
The bathroom-a sound. She screamed and threw the jar of tomato sauce. It broke against the wall, the sauce leaving a smear of red down the tiles.
She waited.
Nothing. She looked in the tub. How stupid she felt. It was simple. Maybe Mrs. Sanders had been through and had forgotten the lights and door. Maybe the electric meter needed to be read. Something like that.
It was when she pressed her door shut to lock it safely that she saw the Polaroid taped at nose-height. At first she didn't understand. It was simple to understand, she knew, but she was not yet understanding. She wasn't ready to understand it. The fact of the photo, as well as the care with which it was placed, were confusing in and of themselves, but not as much as what it showed-a man with a trimmed beard looking right at her in fear. It was Rick, that was Rick's face, with some kind of swollen, bluish wound to his cheek, and he was holding up- something-he was looking right at the camera, face sweaty and afraid, and he was holding up his-now she saw it, saw the horror-they'd cut it off. His left arm, above the elbow, something clamped on it to stop the bleeding-they'd cut off his left arm just above the elbow, cut clean like a butcher cut a ham, and with his other arm he was lifting the stump up to her. Come forward, his eyes said, go back.
She knew then, beyond her fear that Rick had been punished for her acts, that he had again turned her life against the direction she sought. She understood, without the how or the why, that he'd led them to her. All she wanted, had ever wanted, was to be free, to have some peace. She felt the return of a very old weight, a weight she'd first carried before she'd been arrested, when she knew she had to escape Rick and the others; it was huge, a pile of bricks, a weight that had achieved its most vicious unmovability in the days after she'd arrived in prison, when, looking at the walls and the razor wire and the deadened eyes of the women around her, she'd thought, If this is what has come of love, I will be careful in the future, I will think about how I love in a different way, because the old way has just about killed me. I will start new on love and not expect it to look or sound like it did before. And that was what happened with Mazy, who was so hollowed out by sorrow that she'd responded to the simplest of affections with parched appreciation. The weight had lessened then, as Christina decided that she'd live among the other women and not against them. It was not their fault she was there. Now, looking at the clean, wet cross section of Rick's muscular arm, and with Charlie's crisp business card in her purse and his semen between her legs, she felt the old weight return in its full measure, the heaviness like a pile of bricks the size of a church, and she thought again-not yet with bitterness or sudden fear but with an appalled sadness: This is what has come of my love.
Emergency Room, Bellevue Hospital, East Twenty-seventh Street and First Avenue, Manhattan September 22, 1999
The giant tomato plants lay in exact lines, each perfectly staked, and he walked along them in the sun, touching the basketball-sized fruits, most red, some still green, and their absolute perfection pleased him; not one was bruised or damaged by insects. If he pressed his nose through the vines and peered close to the tomatoes, actually brushed his eyelashes against their tightened skins, he could see inside them like translucent balloons; to his delight each contained his mother's red face, her eyes shut in private exhaustion, her mouth open just enough to take another shallow, labored breath. She'd tied a handkerchief over her thinning hair. Her eyes opened unevenly, like the weighted lids of a doll. Hello, Ricky-love. Mommy's tired today. She smiled with a false sweetness that begged him to go elsewhere for affection, for she was busy dying-your mother is very sick, son, we have to keep the house quiet for her-and then she could no longer even smile, and her eyes closed, again unevenly like a doll's, except this time one eye remained open a few seconds too long, watching strangely. He drew back from the tomatoes and resumed walking through the rows, toward his yellow truck parked nearby, and as he stepped over the soft earth, the plants changed in size, not only shrinking from the height of his shoulders to his waist to his knees to his feet but the rows narrowing as well, such that he understood that his size was changing, that he was growing up and away, so much that the tomato plants were now merely a green velveteen fuzz he brushed with his fingers. An excremental black ooze appeared, exactly the same stuff that came out of the diseased oysters that dragged up in the fishing net. You didn't want the oysters, they made you sick, but here they were growing all over his truck, little ones covering the bumper and hood and doors and roof, and he had to flick on the wipers to keep them off the windshield. The wipers crunched the oyster shells, leaving a brown-green smear across the glass. He got out of the truck and grabbed the snow shovel he kept behind the backseat. You had to scrape them fast before they grew back, and of course he was taking some of the paint off the truck, couldn't be helped. He worked for a few minutes and pushed the oysters into a crunchy pile, shoveling them like heavy-grade gravel, then retrieved the gas can from the truck and splashed it over the oysters. The matches were in his breast pocket. A quick puff of flame, then black smoke. Fucking oysters. The shells softened and sagged in the heat, burning like rubber, bubbling and fusing into a blackened soup that cooled quickly as the flames died away. A large black pancake remained. He pushed the blade of the snow shovel under one edge and lifted; as he suspected, a glistening metallic undersurface revealed itself. With the shovel he loosened around the edges and flipped over the giant black disk. The thing was immensely heavy; he could feel the quadriceps in his thighs gather, tightening the tendons around his knees, his calf muscles knot as they contracted. Easy, Rick, keep it balanced so you get the perfect flip. The edges sagged over the snow shovel like a dead thing. He took a breath and flipped the shovel. It landed heavily and the shimmery underside resolved itself into a silver pool. He bent over, peered down. He dropped his leg in, boot and all, and lifted out the flapping tail of a sea bass attached to his leg. He could feel it thrashing independently of his intention. A beautiful thing, every scale perfect. He dropped his fish-leg back in and pulled out his normal leg. Toes wiggling in a warm sock. Excellent. But what about his arm, could he do it with his arm? The question made him anxious. Come on, Rick, you pussy, you pussy- lover. Put it in. Paul would never do it. Paul would say, You got away with the leg, don't put in the arm. Don't fucking do it. Don't! Well, this was where they were different, he and Paul. At age twenty-nine he had injected himself with human growth hormone for three months and won the New York State Regionals, his biceps as wide around as a can of paint. At age twenty-four he had swallowed some kind of chemical in liquid suspension that was used to stimulate male horses on stud farms. Very illegal, very dangerous, and according to the other bodybuilders, very amazing-and then he'd fucked a girl off and on for six hours straight, his dick swelling up so hard that the skin began to fail, even splitting in a few places. Never mind the hallucinations and the sickening spasms in his chest. Never mind that he lost seven pounds. The next day his lower back was so cramped he couldn't walk, and the girl was under the care of her gynecologist. It was not his fault that she attempted suicide when he said he didn't want to see her anymore. At nineteen he had walked up the main cable of the Brooklyn Bridge, sliding one foot in front of the other as the slope of the cable steepened toward the top of the bridge's stone tower. When he reached the summit, he'd spray-painted his name over the other names, smoked a cigarette, and thought about jumping. So what was the big deal about sticking your arm into a pool of silver? At fifteen he and two other guys had set the southbound service lane of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on fire, using ten mattresses stolen from a motel outside JFK International that they'd soaked with gasoline. So fuck you,
