“Stop!”
At least it sounded like stop. Breavman stopped but the command was not for him.
“Brother!”
He wished he understood their language. Why did he think he knew what the words were? The two men were fighting on the steps, wedging Breavman against the wall. He extracted his feet with difficulty, like someone stepping out of quicksand.
It took two seconds. They hugged each other tightly. There was a hollow grunt, Breavman could not be sure from which man. Then one stood up and ran. The other’s head hung over the edge of the step less muscularly than a head should. The throat was widely and deeply cut.
Several voices shrieked for the police. A man who had the air of a doctor kneeled beside the body, which was already soaked in blood, shook his head philosophically to indicate that he was used to this sort of thing, then got up and went away. His attention had quieted the crowd, which was now beginning to bottleneck the passage, but after he had disappeared for some moments the cries for the police were renewed.
Breavman thought he should do something. He took off his jacket, intending to cover the victim, not the face, perhaps the shoulders. But what for? You did this for shock. The slit throat was past shock. It was softly bleeding over the IRT steps at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. At exactly one o’clock in the afternoon. Poor lousy urban matador. The white-on-white tie nattily knotted. The brown and white shoes very pointed and recently polished.
Breavman folded the jacket over his arm. It would implicate him. The police would want to know why he draped his jacket over a corpse. A bloody jacket was not a good idea for a souvenir. Sirens from the street. The crowd began to break up and Breavman went with it.
A few blocks away Breavman reflected that two years before he would have done it. A small death, like discovering that you can no longer slip into old underwear or ting the bell with the wooden mallet.
Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?
Two years ago he would have dipped the jacket, made the gesture, connected himself with the accident. Was the ritual dissolving? Was this an advance from morbidity?
A vision of Nazi youth presented itself. Rows and rows of the gold heads filing past the assassinated soldier. They lowered their company flags into the wound and promised. Breavman swallowed bile.
A steady underground question persisted. Who was the man? Sometimes the question was obscured into Where did he buy the shoes? and From what corner did he flash them? Who was the man? Was he the man asleep in the subway at three in the morning dressed in a brand-new suit with cuff marks over the white part of his shoes? Did girls like his blue hair tonic? What shabby room did he step out of, glittering like the plastic madonna on the dresser? Who was the man? Where was he climbing? What was the quarrel, where was the girl, how much was the money? The knife into what water from what foggy bridge? Barry Fitzgerald and the rookie cop want to know everything.
Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?
Breavman supported himself against a trash basket and vomited. A Chinese waiter ran out of the restaurant.
“Do it up the street. People eat here.”
Puking clears the soul, he thought as he walked away. He was walking with all his body, which was newly light, easy with athletic promise. You’re filled with poison, it’s brewing in every pouch and hole and pocket of your insides, you’re a swamp, then the sickening miracle, sloof! And you’re empty, free, begin again your second cold clear chance, thank you, thank you.
The buildings, doorways, sidewalk cracks, city trees shone bright and precise. He was where he was, all of him, beside a dry-cleaning store, high on the smell of clean brown-wrapped clothes. He was nowhere else. In the window was a secular bust of a man with a chipped plaster shirt and a painted tie. It didn’t remind him of anything when he stared at it. He was wildly happy to be where he was. Clean and empty, he had a place to begin from, this particular place. He could choose to go anywhere but he didn’t have to think about that because here he was and every free deep breath was a beginning. For a second he lived in a real city, one that had a mayor and garbage men and statistical records. For one second.
Puking clears the soul. Breavman remembered what he felt like. Fry’s Stationery, buying school supplies. Ten years old. The whole new school year coiled like a dragon to be conquered by sharp yellow Eagle pencils. Fresh erasers, rows of them, crying to be sacrificed for purity and stars for Neatness. The stacks of exercise books dazzlingly empty of mistakes, more perfect than Perfect. Unblunted compasses, lethal, containing millions of circles, too sharp and substantial for the cardboard box that contained them. Grown-up ink, black triumphs, eradicable mistakes. Leather bags for the dedicated trek from home to class, arms free for snowball or chestnut attacks. Paper clips surprisingly heavy in their small box, rulers with markings as complicated and important as a Spitfire’s dashboard, sticky red-bordered labels to fasten your name to anything. All tools benign, unused. Nothing yet an accomplice to failure. Fry’s smelled newer than even a winter newspaper brought in after the thump on the porch. And he commanded all these sparkling lieutenants.
Puking clears the soul but the bad juices come back quick. New York got lost in Breavman’s private city. Gauze grew on everything and as usual he had to imagine the real shape of things. He no longer felt the light Olympic candidate. The painted plaster bust reminded him of some religious statues in a window a few blocks back. They were gaudy, plastic,
