visible in their faces, despite the humor and pathos of owning such a complicated weapon for a person such as me.
I can see the scornful humor and pity in what I do sometimes. And I can almost enjoy it on the level of being helpless.
My life was not mine anymore. But I didn't want it to be. I watched him knot his tie and knew who he was. His bathroom mirror had a readout telling him his temperature and blood pressure at that moment, his height, weight, heart rate, pulse, pending medication, whole health history from looking at his face, and I was his human sensor, reading his thoughts, knowing the man in his mind.
It tells your height in case you shrink at night, which can happen anabolically.
Cigarettes are not part of the profile of the person you think I am. But I'm a violent smoker. I need what I need very badly. I don't read for pleasure. I don't bathe often because it isn't affordable. I buy my clothes at Value Drugs. You can do this in America, dress yourself from a drugstore head to toe, which I admire quietly. But whatever the sundry facts, I'm not so different from you in your inner life in the sense that we're all uncontrollable.
They carried her down the stairs in her wheelchair with her baby. I was disoriented in my head. Maybe you have seen the spikes on a lying polygraph. This is my wave of thought sometimes, thinking how do I respond to this. I left teaching to make my million. It was the right time and tide to do this. But then I felt derived, sitting at my workstation. I felt inserted there, a person in a situation not of his choosing, even though I'd made the choice to be there, and the closest he ever came was overhearing distance.
I'm ambivalent about killing him. Does this make me less interesting to you, or more?
I'm not one of those trodden bodies you try not to look at when you walk down certain streets. I don't look at them either. I'm knocking down the walls in my living space, a task of many weeks that's nearly done now I buy my bottled water in the Mexican grocery up the street. There are two clerks or an owner and a clerk and they both say No problem. I say Thank you. No problem.
I used to lick coins as a child. The fluting at the edge of a common coin. The milling it is called. I lick them still, sometimes, but worry about the dirt trapped in the milling.
But to take another person's life? This is the vision of the new day. I am determined finally to act. It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before. But how to imagine the moment? I'm not sure I can reach the point of even doing it mentally, two faceless men with runny colored clothes.
And how will I find him to kill, much less actually aim and shoot? So it is largely academic, this give-and- take.
When I pay with coins I go into small fixations of miscounting and fumbling.
But how do I live if he's not dead? He can be a dead father. I will offer this hope. They can harvest his sperm, then freeze it for fifteen months. After this it's a simple matter to impregnate his widow or a voluntary mother.
Then another person will grow into his form and flesh and I will have something to hate when it is old enough to be a man.
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.
I have my iron desk that I hauled up three flights of stairs, with ropes and wedges. I have my pencils that I sharpen with a paring knife.
There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?
4
The limousine was a striking sight under the streetlamp, with a bruised cartoonish quality, a car in a narrative panel, it feels and speaks. The opera lights were on, twelve per side, placed between windows in sets of four. The driver stood at the rear, holding open the door. Eric did not enter immediately. He stopped and looked at the driver. He'd never done this before and it took him a while to see the man.
The man was slim and black, medium height. He had a longish face. He had an eye, the left, that was hard to find beneath the deep sag of the lid. The lower rim of the iris was visible, shut off in a corner. The man had a history, evidently. There were evening streaks in the white of the eye, a sense of blood sun. Things had happened in his life.
Eric liked the idea that a man with a devastated eye drove a car for a living. His car. This made it even better.
He remembered that he needed to urinate. He did it in the car, stooping, and watched the bowl fold back into its housing. He didn't know what happened to the waste. Maybe it was tanked up somewhere in the underside of the automobile or possibly dumped directly in the street, violating a hundred statutes.
The car's fog lamps were glowing. The river was only two blocks away, bearing its daily inventory of chemicals and incidental trash, floatable household objects, the odd body bludgeoned or shot, all ghosting prosaically south to the tip of the island and the seamouth beyond.
The light was red. Only the sparsest traffic moved on the avenue ahead and he sat in the car and realized how curious it was that he was willing to wait, no less than the driver, just because a light was one color and not another. But he wasn't observing the terms of social accord. He was in a patient mood, that's all, and maybe feeling thoughtful, being mortally alone now, with his bodyguards gone.
The car crossed Tenth Avenue and went past the first small grocery and then the truck lot lying empty. He saw two cars parked on the sidewalk, shrouded in torn blue tarp. There was a stray dog, there's always a lean gray dog nosing into wadded pages of a newspaper. The garbage cans here were battered metal, not the gentrified rubber products on the streets to the east, and there was garbage in open boxes and a scatter of trash fanning from a supermarket cart upended in the street. He felt a silence descend, an absence unrelated to the mood of the street at this hour, and the car passed the second small grocery and he saw the ramparts above the train tracks that ran below street level and the garages and body shops sealed for the night, steel shutters marked with graffiti in Spanish and Arabic.
The barbershop was on the north side of the street and faced a row of old brick tenements. The car stopped and Eric sat there, thinking. He sat for five, six minutes. Then the door croaked open and the driver stood on the sidewalk, looking in.
'We are here,' he said finally.
Eric stood on the sidewalk looking at the tenements across the street. He looked at the middle building in a line of five and felt a lonely chill, fourth floor, windows dark and fire escape bare of plants. The building was grim. It was a grim street but people used to live here in loud close company, in railroad flats, and happy as anywhere, he thought, and still did, and still were.
His father had grown up here. There were times when Eric was compelled to come and let the street breathe on him. He wanted to feel it, every rueful nuance of longing. But it wasn't his longing or yearning or sense of the past. He was too young to feel such things, and anyway unsuited, and this had never been his home or street. He was feeling what his father would feel, standing in this place.
The barbershop was closed. He knew it would be closed at this hour. He went to the door and saw that the back room was lighted. It had to be lighted, whatever the hour. He knocked and waited and the old man came moving through the dimness, Anthony Adubato, in his working outfit, a striped white tunic, short-sleeved, with baggy pants and running shoes.
Eric knew what the man would say when he opened the door.
'But how come you're such a stranger lately?'
'Hello, Anthony.'
'Long time.'
'Long time. I need a haircut.'
'You look like what. Get in here so I can look at you.'
He flipped the light switch and waited for Eric to sit in the one barber chair that was left. There was a hole in the linoleum where the other chair had been and there was the toy chair for kids, still here, a green roadster with red steering wheel.
