When he left he exited into snow dense as a fog, the wind off the river tearing at his coat and scarf, and he immediately felt whitewashed, cleansed by the astringent precipitation and the wind thumping his back, pushing him toward the city. For a lesser mortal, the stairs might have been a problem, as they’d been completely obliterated by the snow, but he dug in his toes and climbed slowly up to the street. Clear of the rail yard, he turned to look down at the old YMCA but could not see it through the whiteout.
From a deep brownstone porch across the street, well enough protected from the storm and wearing the best snow boots and parka a doting father could buy, Vikram Patel watched John hoist himself up the iron staircase. Vik was out in the storm for no reason other than he was thirteen and subject to the same urges that had driven his father to leave Mahuva in 1961, that same intense curiosity and fearless embrace of solitude. Vik had been back to the office and, finding it empty—Bonny’d had no choice but to set out on his own in search of Vik—assumed his father had left for home. He knew he should do the same, but the empty city beckoned to him. On this night, New York as barren as a desert, he only wanted to survey the storm, snag some samples for himself, examine them under the portable microscope he’d brought with him. He wrote poetry when he was thirteen; maybe he wrote one about that night. I never thought to ask. Sweet boy, my Vik, my vanished husband.
20.
By order of the freshly anointed Mayor Koch, Vik had spent most of the day hanging out with Bonny. New York public schools had closed early, and while his father slept off a long night haggling at the dock warehouses, Vik spent the afternoon in the office double-checking his father’s entries into the cloth-bound rokat khata and jama nakal, zeroing out the previous month’s nutmeg, cinnamon, fennel, cloves, tamarind, turmeric, pepper, and chili sales. December was always good, then January like a cliff, but they’d done okay. Once he’d squared everything, he stamped the checks and nudged his father, snoring on the settee by the heater, into a state of near-consciousness.
Sign, Pita, he said, dangling pen, deposit slip, and checks. Bonny, without sitting up, cracked his lids to allow the barest sliver of light, and scratched the pen across the checks. His eyes closed and he patted his boy on the arm.
Going to the bank, Vik said.
Bonny raised his hand, his gold pinkie ring glinting, and was asleep before it fell back to his belly. Vik zipped everything into the pouch, clicked the little padlock, and slipped it inside his coat. He went down the stairs, past the blackout curtain over the entrance to the library, the piano theme from The Conversation lilting out.
It was nearly dark outside even though it was not yet four o’clock. Feathery snow was dipping around in the air, and the sky was baggy, foil and slate. Even though he knew the banks were probably closed along with the schools and the office buildings and everything else, he had to get outside, out of the pickled air of the office where his father had been asleep all day and where the soundtrack from Sal’s film would soon be drifting through the wall at a volume just loud enough to distract him from his reading. He was a good kid, ever attendant to the letter of the law. He would try to deposit the checks, but he was also a teenage boy with an ulterior motive. In his other pocket was a Hensoldt Wetzlar Tami pocket edition microscope, a square of black velvet, and a penlight. Extra Rayovacs for the flashlight.
The Chemical branch was on 72nd, five minutes’ walk. A typed notice on letterhead was taped inside the glass:
CLOSED DUE TO STORM
Beneath that, a rectangle of cardboard, dual hole-punched by a pencil, suspended from a length of string, declared in heavy black Sharpie:
CLOSED
So he roamed. He had pocket money. He saw two movies, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan and Coma. He ate dinner at the Cosmic: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, cubed vegetables, a grape Fanta. He stole glances at the bandaged counterman, who had gone back to his post and was doing his woozy best to stay on his feet after his dustup with John a few hours earlier.
Afterward, Vik rambled some more, down to Columbus Circle, along Central Park South to the Plaza, up Fifth a bit, east on 60th, back down, west on 58th, proscribing a Keanesian pattern of loops and reversals along
