Yes, sir, I can take that down to the incinerator for you … Manny didn’t bother to finish. It was February, the dead cord of winter wrapped tight around a dark matrix, ice atop snow atop ice atop snow, and they were standing in a blizzard. What the hell was he standing in a blizzard for?
Why don’t we just pitch the bag, Manny said, and get back inside?
Roger that, my father said. He casually tossed the bag toward the street. The wind spiked it into the snowbank.
For all Manny cared, my father could stand in the snow until he froze to death, as long as he went across the street to do it. But standing on the sidewalk in front of the Apelles, my father had made it a financial issue for Manny. If something were to happen—and it would, even in a blizzard, it would, god help him, that would be his luck, wouldn’t it, at best Mr. Saltwater would only get mugged, mugged by the only mugger out in the whole city, and a man like him would probably fight back, which all the libertarian types did, which would guarantee blood, which would find its way back to Manny’s hands, his neglect having resulted in a tenant’s beating, and there’s only so much the union can do in a situation like that—Manny would be culpable, so he, too, would have to stand in the snow and wind freezing his ass off until this nutjob decided to conclude his meditation, or whatever he was doing. Assault might be the least of Manny’s worries. My father, it occurred to him, was the type who might die from exposure because he got lost in his own head.
The streetlights were horizontal. Manny was losing contact with his toes and ears. He clamped his teeth together and bounced on the balls of his feet.
My father wasn’t much better off. After the initial blaze of heat that came in the moments after the incident with the taxi, his trapezius had clinched tight against his neck, an ammoniac ache transmitting up to his skull and down the trapdoor to his spine. He was snorting vigilantly to counteract the copious streams of snot escaping his nostrils, and his jaw was set in concrete.
Waiting for someone? Manny said.
No, not in so many words, my father said.
Probably someone coming to the party, Manny said, tipping his chin at the figure down the block.
Some nut. I don’t know, my father said.
The day before, my father had caught the first train home from Montauk, leaving my mother and me to snowshoe and skate with the Vornados. We were going to have fun. He’d thought he’d better get out before it was too late.
On the subway from Penn Station, a blind man had come tapping into his nearly empty car and had pitched a finely cadenced oration delivered in oaken tones that carried cleanly from one end of the car to the other, touching on his personal journey as a man, his failures and struggles, the temporal nature of existence, before landing on the emotional appeal for whatever a kind soul might be able to spare. The change in his cup had rattled as he’d walked, and he’d paused directly in front of my father, facing the wrong way, which my father assumed was intended to sell his state of terrible existential loneliness, a nice piece of stagecraft to underscore the fact that not only was he a blind beggar, but he was bad at it, miles more pitiable than your run-of-the-mill retinopathic pencil salesman. But it had backfired. He’d overcooked it. This wasn’t the Peoria Playhouse, kiddo. If only he’d shuffled a few feet farther down the car, canted himself at a diagonal—no, it was too pathetic by half. My father looked at the man’s shoes, disintegrating brogues held together with twine, the pants and coats in triplicate … and he felt a pang, and then he thought what he always thought, which was, what difference did it make if the guy was president of the con artists union? Who the hell would choose to live this way? Was it really so impossible to believe that the man was blind? If my father said nothing, and if no other passenger verbally identified himself—a likely scenario, as the only other passengers were a couple of winos sleeping it off and a solo passenger at the far end of the car—then for all the blind man knew he was floating in space, shaking his cup at the galactic void. What if he’d stopped in front of my father not to sell it but because he was hopelessly wretched at begging, so wretched that he had been relegated to roaming these wretched tunnels, addressing empty cars, rattling his cup at empty seats? No, my father thought, it couldn’t be a con. His spirit couldn’t take it if it was a con.
Genuine blindness, then. And what a relief, because my father was then freed of his fear of making eye contact, which was what all the mental acrobatics had been about in the first place, because even after all these years guilt was writhing around inside him, down beneath all the dead skin encasing his soul. Sure, the city was a bathypelagic zone, but the company line—that he had to protect his own tender heart with a thick callus—was bullshit. The truth was, he couldn’t give because he couldn’t take on the man’s burden, not even for a second, and if he looked him square in his fake blind eye, he’d have to help. My father was already carrying too much.
The IRT screeched northward, lights flickering, and the blind man moved on, tap-tapping, pausing at the sour scent of the drunks, giving the cup a cursory shake, passing on. As the train neared 66th the other passenger at the far end stood up, just as the blind man positioned himself in the same exit, facing into the car, giving no indication that he
