Inverted, motionless, the counterman was wedged between two stools, breathing onto the filthy linoleum, his toes resting on the counter. A dim light glowed deep within the cave of his brain, a fire tended by two of his hairy ancestors whose shadows were thrown in monstrous relief onto the ceiling as the quartzite in the walls flickered. They were plotting against a third hairy ancestor, the one who stood outside the cave counting his chattel. Murder. The counterman needed to murder someone good, but who? Then, out candle, out, a blank.
For that moment after his brain got smacked silly against the forewall of his skull, there was quiet. He was not transported to happier days. No first kiss or Wonderwheel rides, no recollection of the hot tarmac at San Francisco International, where he smelled the salty bay and got down on his knees and kissed the concrete slab, unfreezing blood that had been frozen tight in his veins for the year he was stationed in Truong Lam. When he hit the floor, he remembered nothing; he became a rolling blankness, a deep, briny Arctic channel.
In the seconds following a sudden act of public violence, paralysis often strikes bystanders, and it was only to pay bravado its due that John had dropped his shoulder as he ran for the door. The waiters, in no hurry to put themselves in the path of trouble, couldn’t have backed up any faster if he’d been waving around a pistol. The owner, whose mushroomed girth prohibited him from a livelier reaction, swung his fleshy arm in John’s direction, clearing the checkout counter of the mint dish and check spike, a crack, tinkle, and clatter to accompany the shrieking of the door’s aluminum frame against the salty jamb as John charged onto the sidewalk in a spy’s karate crouch.
It was dark, the street clogged with cabs, exhaust, steam pumping out of manhole covers, pedestrians exhaling plumes of white. John zagged through the crowd to the curb and, keeping watch on the door, buttoned up his coat, clapped his hat on his head, and carefully wrapped up his neck. If he was meant to be killed by the savage counterman, he would perish with a warm neck. A cold body led to constricted cords, caused tension everywhere that threw off the tone and turned a vibrato into a warble. Even worse, obviously, was illness—a cold, an oozing sinus, congestion, god help him, bronchitis. Breath control vanished. The limbs became leaden, the diaphragm weak, the bellows clogged, the sound cut off at the tap. Singer muted.
A thought whipped past as if on a stock ticker: Go back and fight. Be a man. Fight. He stepped toward the diner and saw the waiters tending to the counterman, whom they’d comforted into a booth. It was not big enough to contain his sprawling mass, his lolling head. The counterman was facing away from the window, and John moved yet closer to the glass and watched as Nikos applied a bag of ice while another waiter planted pats of reassurance on the man’s back, broad as a Volkswagen. He would have ripped my head off, John thought.
A man and a woman, the woman in a long cashmere coat, her shoulders padded with snow, passed John on their way into the diner. They were just inside when they saw the huddle at the booth, and they turned right around and left.
Nikos glanced back at the door, and saw John through the glass, the nice young man with manners, peering in at him, his face desolate. Why would he behave this way? Every day Nikos watched customers flow in and out, mostly regulars, dependable people. A boy disappears for years. He returns and … this. Who could explain such behavior? He lifted his arm from the counterman’s back and shooed John away, the same threatless gesture his father had employed to rid his café of the poor boys who begged five lepta coins from the customers back in Patras. Such a life, here in this stupid filthy flat city. Such a life, that he should find himself here, working in this place, nursing the broken head of this maniac.
A normal person, having incited a stranger to murderous rage, having possibly broken some part of his own hand in the process, might find his own thoughts to be as thrashingly wild as a flock of geese frightened into flight, but John, forged in a Caldwell-brand furnace, was tempered to resist chaos. He had it to thank for his controlled performances—he never missed a cue, never botched his blocking. His body was under control. He kept his voice under control, no matter the venue. But it had turned out that audiences wanted a wild man, not a record player.
He inhaled a sharp bellyful of February, his face a Kabuki mask. He waved farewell to Nikos, and as he did, he realized that for a few minutes he’d forgotten his son.
He walked south on Broadway. A flotilla of gray cloud was dragging across the jagged reef of high-rises. Wind barreled down the avenue, bending the saplings planted in the center divider, and John sank deeper into his collar. Northbound, southbound, the avenue was awash in hazy taillights, red dots and dashes transmitting an endless, meaningless telegram.
His chest was tingling and his blood was flying around inside his limbs. A man must maintain dominion over himself. His appearance is his calling card. Things his father said.
What would it feel like, he wondered, to grab the wrist of anyone who sat across from him—even Nikos—and pull that person to him in a tight embrace? How great the gift of another person’s attention, how unthinkably loving. He’d gone the wrong way with the counterman, but he’d had his attention, just for a moment.
John ducked into a tobacconist’s, not his usual. The man behind the counter, his pilled brown sweater zipped up
