each other and pretend we’re having a pleasant experience!’
His father’s eyes narrowed. ‘I see no point in continuing this.’
‘David!’ His mother pleaded with him silently.
Mingolla had no intention of apologizing, enjoying his charge of anger, but after a long silence he relented. I’m kinda tense, Dad. Sorry.’
‘What I fail to understand,’ his father said, ‘is why you insist on trying to impress us with the gravity of your situation. We know it’s grave, and we’re concerned about you. We simply don’t believe it’s appropriate to discuss our concern on your birthday.’
‘I see.’ Mingolla bit off the words.
‘Apology accepted,’ said his father with equal precision.
For the remainder of the conversation, Mingolla fielded questions with a flawless lack of honesty, and after the screen had faded to gray, his anger also grayed. He lay punching the remote control buttons, flipping from car chases to talk shows and then to a haze of pointilist dots that resolved into a plain of bleached-looking ruins. He recognized Tel Aviv, remembered the ultimate bad omen of the city nuked on his birthday. The picture broke up, and he jabbed the next button. The ruins reappeared, the camera tracking past a solitary wall, twisted girders, and piles of bricks. Dark thunderheads boiled over the city, their edges fraying into silver glare; shards of buildings stood in silhouette against a band of pale light on the horizon, like black fangs biting the sky. There was no sound, but when Mingolla adjusted the fine tuning, he heard bluesy guitar chords, synthesizer, a noodling sax, and a woman’s voice… obviously the voiceover from another channel.
‘…Prowler’s latest, “Blues for Heaven,”’ she was saying. ‘Hope it ain’t too depressin’ for you music lovers. But, hey! Depression’s all over these days, right? Just consider it a mood alternative… like a drug, y’know. Little somethin’ to add texture to your usual upbeat feelin’, make it all that much sweeter.’
It had begun to rain in Tel Aviv, a steady drizzle, and the music seemed the aural counterpart of the rain, of the clouds and their fuming passage across the city.
‘Prowler,’ said the woman. ‘The fabulous Jack Lescaux on vocals. Tell ’em ’bout the real world, Jack.’
‘Laney’s in her half-slip, pacin’ up and down, chain-smokin’ Luminieres, watchin’ the second hand spin ’round.
I’m sittin’ at the window, pickin’ out a slow gray tune, and two shadows walkin’ east on Lincoln turn down Montclair Avenue.
“That mother he ain’t comin’ back,“ says Laney. “Y’can’t trust him when he’s broke. I just know he took my money.” She blows a blue-steel jet of smoke.
I say, “Take it easy, honey. Why don’t you do some of my frost.”
She laughs ’cause life without the proper poison is a joke at any cost.’
The song with its mournful disposition, its narrative of two junkies enduring a bad night, was like the voice of a ghost wandering the city, and it pulled Mingolla in, drew him along, making him feel that he—with his shattered memories and emotions—was himself half a ghost, and causing him to imagine that he would be at home among the spirits of Tel Aviv, able to offer them the consolation of flesh-and-blood companionship. There was a premonitory clarity to this thought, but he was too absorbed in the music and the city to explore it further. He saw that the ruins posed a dire compatibility for him, enforcing the self-conception that he was the ruin of a human being in whom a ruinous power was being bred.
‘David.’ Dr. Izaguirre’s voice behind him. ‘Time for your injection.’
‘Inna second… I wanna hear the rest of the song.’
Izaguirre made a noise of grudging acceptance and walked in front of the screen. He was pale, long limbed, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, thinning gray hair, and a perpetually ardent expression: an aquiline El Greco Christ aged to sixty or thereabouts and fleshed out a bit, dressed in a starched guayabera and slacks. He peered at the ruins as if searching them for survivors, then pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket and fitted them to his nose with an affected flourish. All his gestures were affected, and Mingolla believed this reflected a conscious decision. He had the impression that Izaguirre felt so in control of his life, so unchallenged, that he had tailored the minutiae of his personality in order to entertain himself, had transformed his existence into a game, one that would test his elegant surface against the dulling inelegance of the world.
‘Tel Aviv,’ said Izaguirre. ‘Terrible, terrible.’ He went back behind the couch and gave Mingolla’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze just as a flight of armored choppers flew out of the east over the city. It may have been this sight that triggered Mingolla’s response, and perhaps Izaguirre’s squeeze had a little to do with it, but whatever the cause, Mingolla’s eyes filled, and he was flooded with a torrent of suddenly liberated emotions and thoughts, mingling shame over his behavior with his parents, irritation at Izaguirre’s witness, and loathing for the self- absorption that had prevented him from relating to the tragedy of Tel Aviv in other than trivial and personal terms.
‘…rain is falling harder, makin’ speckles on the walk, blankets stuffed in broken windows glow softly in the dark.
An old bum his hands in baggies, slumps in a doorway ’cross the street, his eyes are brown like worn-out pennies, got bedroom slippers on his feet.
Some wise-ass stops and says, “Hey buddy! Know where I can get some rags like that?”
The bum keeps starin’ into nowhere… he knows nowhere’s where it’s at.’
Mingolla was overwhelmed by the desolation of the ruins and the song. The white blossoms lay in the dust like crumpled pieces of paper, the camera zoomed in on one to show how it was blackening from the radiation, and his identification with the place was so complete, he felt the white thoughts lying in the dust of his mind beginning to blacken as well. The vacancy of Tel Aviv was a sleet riddling him, seeding him with emptiness, and he came to his feet, buoyed by that emptiness, gripping the sofa to keep from floating away.
‘Don’t you want to listen?’ Izaguirre sounded amused.
‘Naw, un-uh.’
‘Are you sure? We have time.’
Mingolla shook his head no, continued to shake it, trying to get rid of all his nos, all his negatives, each shake more vehement, and when Izaguirre put an arm around him, he was most grateful, desperate to be led away from Tel Aviv and Prowler, ready now for his injection.
A crunching in the brush. Mingolla looked this way and that, thinking it must be Tully, but spotted a scrawny black man standing about twenty feet away: one of the islanders who inhabited the outbuildings. They had taken to following him around, retreating whenever he tried to confront them, as if he possessed some dread allure. The man slipped deeper into the thicket, and Mingolla relaxed, stretching out his legs. An alp of cumulus edged across the sun, transforming its radiance into a fan of watery light; wind flattened the tops of the bushes. Mingolla closed his eyes, basking in the warmth, in a heady sense of peace.
‘You a damn fool, mon,’ said a rumbling voice above him.
He sat up with a start, blinking. Tully was a black giant, looming into the sky, hands on hips.
‘A true damn fool,’ said Tully. ‘I wastin’ my time teachin’ you dat block, ’cause dere you sit, winkin’ on and off like a fuckin’ caution light. What you doin’, mon? Daydreamin’?’
‘I…’
‘Shut your fool mouth. Now dis’—he tapped his chest—‘dis a good block. And dis ain’t.’ As if a furnace door had been slung open, Tally’s heat washed over Mingolla. ‘And dis what you doin’.’ The heat ebbed, vanished, flared again. ‘I should put my foot to you!’
The sun hung directly behind Tully’s head, a golden corona rimming a black oval. Mingolla felt weak and weakening, felt that threads of himself were being spun loose and sucked into the blackness. Panicked, acting in reflex, he pushed at Tully not with his hands, but with his mind, and he was panicked still more by the sensation that he had fallen into a school of electric fish, thousands of them, brushing against him, darting away. Tully’s fist swung toward him, but that electricity, and the attendant feelings of arousal and strength, was so commanding that Mingolla was frozen, unable to duck, and the blow struck the top of his head, knocking him flat.
‘You ain’t got de force to war wit’ me, Davy.’ Tully squatted beside him. ‘But, mon, I just been waitin’ for you to make dis breakt’rough. Now we can really get started.’
Mingolla’s head throbbed, grass tickled his lower lip. He stared at the tips of Tully’s tennis shoes, the cuffs of his blue trousers. He struggled up, leaned against the wall, groggy.
‘Caught me by surprise, mon, or I stay from bashin’ you.’ Tully grinned, gold crowns glittering among his
