John had turned to face the window near my father, standing at a measured distance so that he could see the double exposure of the lobby projected onto the snowfall, the fluorescent tubing stitched in bright dashes across the surface, his own ghosted face hovering in the foreground. He was muttering to himself, and after a while said, What are we supposed to do now? Wander around out there until we freeze to death? He’d like that. That would please him no end.
Either we go to the Twentieth Precinct, my father said, and wait for someone to bring him in, or we go home and wait.
John looked in my father’s direction, intending to respond, but his eye caught something in the distance over his shoulder. My father swiveled his head to see, and John made a sucking sound. Don’t! Eyes this way. This way, John hissed.
My father complied by staring again at the coffee machine, his posture comically erect, straining to hear something that might give him a clue what was going on. The intercom chattered over the crackly strains of something classical. On the far side of the expanse, the elevators chimed and the doors clunked open, closed. Slowly, with the deliberate nonchalance specific to a person attempting to draw as little attention as possible to himself and in the process making a real show of his acting chops, my father turned his head in the direction of the elevators.
No, John said. Be still.
John slowly sat down next to him and leaned back until his spine touched the glass.
Are you hiding? my father whispered.
Yes, John said.
It almost worked, but John’s pipe, that elegant sine wave between his teeth, gave him away. Having exited the elevator, a cold pack lashed to his forehead by an Ace bandage, and having crossed the lobby toward the coffee machine, the counterman from the Cosmic’s poor banged-up brain flashed a sign of recognition, and he opened his eyes wide, wider, and the mouth beneath his eyes shaped a word unvocalized but that my father, having by then no doubt about the source of the threat, unmistakably heard in the echo chamber of his own head: Motherfucker.
24.
Before evacuating to Grand Central for their suburbia-bound trains early that afternoon, Tracy and Fil had caught the IRT uptown to look in on their priest of complaint, dear old Dad, who, mounted upon his throne in the oak-paneled study, received them with the air of stoned inattention a prince might reserve for dignitaries of negligible rank who come grubbing down the embassy receiving line. They’d cleared space to sit among the piles of newsprint and journals on the sofas and taken the pneumatic descent into the ancient cushions, which reeked of cigar smoke. The four-hundred-day clock’s pendulum spun and unspun on the mantel. Dust upon dust. The girl was not allowed to clean in here, and he had gotten rid of her anyway, though Tracy and Fil did not yet know it.
That morning he’d given his routines unusual attention. He’d shaved slowly, taking pleasure in the clean lines the razor scored into the cream. His mind had been clear, and he thought for a while on the purity that attended the lifelong practice of a skill, a simple act beatified by decades of repetition. He thought on the perfect unity of windshield wiper blades, the ticking of the rubber as it met the base of the glass. He considered the possibility that men who had lawns to mow might be the luckiest men in the world. They could tame chaos and impose unity in a matter of an hour. Window cleaners, whipping their squeegees in reaping arcs. What a job. To act and see the result right there in front of you. He supposed he’d missed out on the pure good of so much manual labor. The closest he’d come had been in his attention to a properly aligned collar, a properly knotted tie, and what were those things if not the labors of other men that he affixed to his body? All he’d had was the insignificant acreage of his face, which was no longer his but his father’s.
The same routines but a newfound sense of significance. He moved intentionally that morning, attuned to the angle of the light, as if a film had been stripped from his eyes while he slept. Nothing rote about today, no. Feels like a court day, closing arguments, every nerve focused on the moment when you’ll rise to deliver the oratory. The dread, the fear—it was a panther you were stalking; you allowed it to stalk you, too, you lured it closer, listening for the crackle of a leaf, the tensing of muscle before the death leap, and you kept vigilant, knife out. Routine was your camouflage.
A morning different in other ways. Erica had not cleaned the apartment. One day of the week she was off in the morning, but she straightened up first. No, not today.
And then Saltwater had not come, unusual after so long. It was Monday, yes. But he shouldn’t have expected Saltwater, no. The week before, he had failed the test and the avalanche that would end him had slipped loose and begun to build speed.
When Erica moved in, Tracy and Fil’s children, in the city for a Sunday afternoon visit with Grumps, had conducted a thorough sweep of her chest of drawers, closet,
