The man looked down the car at my father. For commiseration, or to stoke my father’s outrage—either way, seeking acknowledgment that he’d meted out some of the casual abuse that kept the city lubricated, but my father refused to look away from his own reflection in the opposite window. The poor bastard must get it a hundred times a day, he thought, his insufferable life made worse every time he mustered the strength to shake the cup.
But, then, really, don’t get sentimental. Which of the men was more deserving of pity? Which was blameless and which one’s mortal soul in jeopardy? Surely the beggar had earned his seat in heaven. Would Jesus extend his kindness only to the halt and lame? Wouldn’t a truly benevolent savior go to the ends of the earth to recover the powerful evildoer who has strayed so much farther from His grace? Furthermore, he thought, which one of these men might be Jesus in disguise, come to the door in the dead of night, a frightful visitor asking for a place to lay his head?
And then my father wished he, too, could tell the awful blind beggar to fuck off, just for being so perfectly weak, ruined, so utterly blameless.
He said nothing. He was not an active participant in the drama of the world. A bit player, at best. But those bit players are not to be discounted—where was almighty Christ without the soldiers who erected the cross and nailed him to it? He’d be sitting on his crossbeam atop Golgotha tossing pebbles at the vultures, waiting for someone to make him the savior of the world, that’s where. Whose sacrifice was greater? Jesus gave up his life, briefly. But the soldiers who nailed him up sacrificed their eternal souls. Just like the Jews who had sent him to his death in the first place: forever reviled, symbols of callous humanity, the lost, the unsaved. Without them, Jesus would have died of old age, arthritic, a little nostalgic for his fiery youth.
My father knew his role in that play. He’d have stood by the side of the road and watched as Jesus passed by in his crown of thorns and then he’d have gone home to scratch onto parchment what he’d seen. Watcher, voyeur, a receiver open to all channels, dutifully taking the world’s transcription, a living, breathing skein gulping down the rank matter of life, distending, bulging, and when he couldn’t swell anymore, shitting it out onto the page. It was a task he took very seriously, staying out of the light. He’d made his own soul insignificant, an afterthought in a corner of limbo so that he could filter the lives of others like a baleen inhaling krill. A watcher. Because when he took part in the pageant he became dangerous, a weapon. He had done it once before, and it had made him a murderer.
So what had he done after witnessing that act of cruelty on the train? He’d ridden on to 72nd, gotten off, climbed out of the ground on the icy half-moon tracks scored into the frozen stairs, up to the bright frigid morning, onto the deserted sidewalk, past the cabs idling here and there, plumes of white streaming from their tailpipes, past the steel cellar hatch doors winged open at the grocer’s on 73rd where a guy in a butcher’s apron was pitching down the cardboard boxes piled in slumping towers at his side, and my father had swollen a little more with every step, vacuuming up the smorgasbord, and he turned and walked under the Apelles’ arch, crossed the courtyard, into the lobby, past O’Halloran, the weekend man, without so much as a nod, and gone up to the apartment, shedding suitcases, boots, gloves, socks, and hat behind him in a bread-crumb trail that led into the pantry, where he banged at the Olivetti for three hours before he felt he’d unburdened himself sufficiently.
Writing down was emptying, yes, but there was no bright moment of relief signaling the end. The writing went on, unresolved, and would go on until he was dead. How else could a person make sense of the world and its inhabitants? He didn’t understand people who didn’t fear oblivion, people content to exist and then leave behind nothing more than a headstone. Every book he wrote was, of course, a faltering attempt to understand those very same people.
And here was another of those mysteries, a prime example, this beast plodding ever closer to my father through the blizzard. Oh, how cute, thought my father, my very own Christ, laden down beneath his cross, disgorged by the city, another chance for me to redeem myself. Hooray. Perhaps I could throw down my coat to line the poor soul’s way. And what monstrosity could this city offer up by way of a savior? A Frankenstein cobbled together from a murder victim’s severed limbs, a brain from an East Village shooting gallery OD, a waterlogged heart from a concrete-shoed Sicilian?
Whatever messenger the city had sent, it was now approaching 78th Street, only a half block away, coming fully into focus in the orange snow-strewn light, not a monster at all, a natural being, a creation like all nature’s creatures, a being brought to life by the conjunction of sperm and egg, an existence. Another Christ figure just like all the rest.
Manny got a bad vibe from this guy. He wasn’t coming for the Vornado party, not with whatever the hell he had strapped to his back. And no one in his right mind would be out on a night like this, not unless he was coming to the party. Anyone who was, this angry weather would just
