'Calderon worked.'
'Well, good for him, the little prick. Maybe what I'll check is the flights out of Kennedy the past three days. Where's he from?'
'Somebody said Cartagena.'
'What's that, a city? Or is it one of those islands?'
'I think it's a city. And it's in either Panama or Colombia or Ecuador or she wouldn't have rented him a room. I think it's Colombia.'
'The gem of the ocean. The calling in fits if he went home. He had somebody phone for him so the job'd be there when he gets back. He can't call up every afternoon from Cartagena.'
'Why'd he clear out of the room?'
'Maybe he didn't like it there. Maybe the exterminator came and knocked off all his pet cockroaches.
Maybe he owed rent and he was skipping.'
'She said no. He was paid up through the week.'
He was silent a moment. Then, reluctantly, he said, 'Somebody spooked him and he ran.'
'It looks that way, doesn't it?'
'I'm afraid it does. I don't think he left the city, either. I think he moved a subway stop away, picked himself a new name, and checked into another furnished room. There's something like half a million illegals in the five boroughs. He doesn't have to be Houdini to hide where we're not gonna find him.'
'You could get lucky.'
'Always a chance. I'll check the morgue first, and then the airlines.
We'll stand the best chance if he's dead or out of the country.' He laughed, and I asked what was so funny. 'If he's dead or out of the country,' he said, 'he's not gonna be a whole lot of good to us, is he?'
The train back to Manhattan was one of the worst, its interior vandalized beyond recognition. I sat in a corner and tried to fight off a wave of despair. My life was an ice floe that had broken up at sea, with the different chunks floating off in different directions. Nothing was ever going to come together, in this case or out of it. Everything was senseless, pointless, and hopeless.
Nobody's going to buy me emeralds. Nobody's going to give me babies. Nobody's going to save my life.
All the good times are gone.
Eight million ways to die, and among them there's a wide variety suitable for the do-it-yourselfer. For all that was wrong with the subways, they still did the job when you threw yourself in front of them.
And the city has no end of bridges and high windows, and stores stay open twenty-four hours a day selling razor blades and clothesline and pills.
I had a .32 in my dresser drawer, and my hotel room window was far enough from the pavement to make death a certainty. But I've never tried that sort of thing, and I've somehow always known I never will. I'm either too scared or too stubborn, or perhaps my particular despair is never as unequivocal as I think it is. Something seems to keep me going.
Of course all bets were off if I drank. I'd heard a man at a meeting who told of coming out of a blackout on the Brooklyn Bridge. He was over the railing and he had one foot in space when he came to. He retrieved the foot, climbed back over the railing, and got the hell out of there.
Suppose he'd come to a second later, with both feet in the air.
If I drank I'd feel better.
I couldn't get the thought out of my head. The worst of it was that I knew it was true. I felt horrible, and if I had a drink the feeling would go away. I'd regret it in the long run, I'd feel as bad and worse again in the long run, but so what? In the long run we're all dead.
I remembered something I'd heard at a meeting. Mary, one of the regulars at St. Paul's, had said it. She was a birdlike woman with a tiny voice, always well dressed and well groomed and soft-spoken. I'd heard her qualify once, and evidently she'd been the next thing to a shopping-bag lady before she hit bottom.
One night, speaking from the floor, she'd said, 'You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don't have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that's not true. Bad feelings won't kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won't.'
The train plunged into the tunnel. As it dropped below ground level all the lights went out for a moment.
Then they came back on again. I could hear Mary, pronouncing each word very precisely. I could see her, her fine-boned hands resting one on top of the other in her lap as she spoke.
Funny what comes to mind.
When I emerged from the subway station at Columbus Circle I still wanted a drink. I walked past a couple of bars and went to my meeting.
The speaker was a big beefy Irishman from Bay Ridge. He looked like a cop, and it turned out he'd been one, retiring after twenty years and currently supplementing his city pension as a security guard.
Alcohol never interfered with his job or his marriage, but after a certain number of years it began to get to him physically. His capacity decreased, his hangovers worsened, and a doctor told him his liver was enlarged.
'He told me the booze was threatening my life,' he said. 'Well, I wasn't some derelict, I wasn't some degenerate drunk, I wasn't some guy who had to drink to get rid of the blues. I was just your normal happy-go- lucky guy who liked a shot an' a beer after work and a six-pack in front of the television set.
