The City: A Novel Read online

  I heard footsteps ascending. They sounded like the footsteps of one person, and they didn’t seem to be those of someone with a gun to her head or a knife to her throat. I stepped inside, eased the door almost shut, as my mother had left it, and hurried to the window.

  When Mom came through the door, she had a little travel case in which she had packed Mrs. Lorenzo’s things. She closed the door and locked both deadbolts. She said, “You better put on your peejays and brush your teeth, honey. It’s getting late.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “You’ll need a blanket for the sofa.”

  “It’s warm enough.”

  “To protect the upholstery.”

  “Oh, yeah. Got it.”

  Minutes later, I was lying on a blanket, on the sofa, in my pajamas, with one of the pillows from my mother’s bed. The front windows remained open because we didn’t have air-conditioning, and traffic noise rose from the street. I could hear my mom and Mrs. Lorenzo talking in the kitchen, but I couldn’t catch enough words to make sense of what they were saying. They were taking a long time, longer than I expected, and I grew anxious about not being able to keep a watch on the street. Later, I would learn that Mom gave Mrs. Lorenzo a few Benadryl and then insisted that they each have a large glass of red wine, which I guess seemed just the right thing to an Italian lady like the widow. When they finally left the kitchen, I pretended to be sleeping, and I pretended all the time that they used the bathroom and dressed for bed. When my mother came to the sofa and whispered good-night and kissed me on the cheek, I lay there with my mouth open, breathing through it, making a soft snoring sound. Before she turned away and switched off the lights and went to her bedroom, she said, “My angel,” which made me feel lowly and deceitful and the very spawn of Tilton Kirk, even though I knew that my motives were good and my heart sincere.

  Lying there in the dark, with the glow of the city invoking ghostly shapes from the familiar objects in the living room, I waited until I thought Mom and the widow might be asleep before I got off the couch and felt my way to one of the windows. The flow of traffic had diminished, and there were fewer pedestrians, as well. I didn’t see my father, but the longer I knelt at the window, with my arms folded on the sill, the more it seemed to me that of the people who walked past or drove by, every one of them appeared suspicious. More than suspicious. There had been another old movie I’d watched about two-thirds of before turning it off. Instead of zombies, the bad guys had been seed-pod people from another world, and they had duplicated real people and had taken their place; you couldn’t tell them from the people they imitated except that they had no real emotions.

  15

  Eventually I returned to the sofa, too exhausted to stand an entire night watch. I dropped into a deep well of sleep and floated there until, after a while, the dream began in a pitch-black place with the sound of rushing water all around, as if I must be aboard a boat on a river in the rain.

  I was lying on my left side, in the fetal position, on an uncomfortable surface, clutching something in my right fist, holding it so tightly that my fingers ached. A great fear overcame me, but of what I couldn’t say, a blind terror in the blind dark of the dream, and my heart was as loud as a felt hammer on a timpani skin, beat and backbeat all but simultaneous. The object in my hand was a penlight.

  Later, I would realize that no previous dream had ever included a fragrance or a flavor, but in this one I tasted blood. My lower lip was swollen, throbbing. When I licked, it stung where split.

  I was holding a penlight, for what reason I don’t know, as I never had possessed one in real life. Still lying on my side, I cried out, startled, when the beam revealed a face directly in front of mine, less than a foot away, a girl perhaps in her early twenties, dark hair wet with rain and pasted to her face, eyes seeming to swell from their sockets, strangled to death with a man’s necktie that still cinched her throat.

  Thrusting up from the darkness of the dream into the lesser darkness of our living room, I came off the sofa and onto my feet, breathless for a moment, and then inhaled with a gasp. I shuddered and put a hand to my mouth, expecting my lower lip to be split and bleeding, but it was not. Because my legs were weak, I sat down at once, grateful that I hadn’t cried out in my sleep as I had done in the nightmare, hadn’t awakened my mother or the widow Lorenzo.

  In my mind’s eye, I could still see the dead girl as clearly as I had seen her in sleep—and as in the dream about Lucas Drackman, a few months earlier, she wasn’t a half-imagined phantom, but instead as vividly detailed as a portrait by Norman Rockwell. Wet hair thick and glistening with rain. Blue eyes shading toward purple, the pupils wide in death. Delicate features, pert nose formed to the perfection of the finest porcelain figurine. Generous mouth. Smooth creamy skin unmarred except for a small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone.

  When I’d awakened from the dream of Lucas Drackman, I had known that he murdered his parents sometime in the past, that what I’d seen wasn’t prophetic, but instead a done deed. In this case, I suspected that I’d been given a predictive vision while asleep, that a day would come when I would find myself surrounded by the sounds of rushing water, enclosed in darkness with a corpse.

  As I sat there on the edge of the sofa, I caught the faint scent of roses and came to my feet. Turning, I saw a woman’s silhouette at one of the front windows, backlit by the night glow of the city. She was too tall to be either Mrs. Lorenzo or my mother. She said softly, “Fiona Cassidy,” and I knew that she had just given me the name of the dead girl in my dream.

  She moved away from the window, vanishing into shadows. When I switched on the lamp beside the sofa, I found myself alone in the living room. If she had really been there, she could not have exited so quickly. Yet I had seen her silhouette, had heard her voice. I had no doubt that she’d been present, although in what sense and to what extent I couldn’t say. She wasn’t a ghost, but she was something more than I had taken her to be on the day when she had first appeared to me, dressed all in pink and promising a piano.

  16

  I should have told my mother about Tilton chasing me into the alleyway, but for the next two days, she occupied herself with Mrs. Lorenzo, helping the widow to arrange the funeral, contacting the life-insurance company regarding Tony’s small policy, which would give the widow only a few years of security, and packing the deceased’s clothes to take them to the Salvation Army because Mrs. Lorenzo had no heart for the job. At the end of each day, Mom was tired and sad, and I didn’t want to burden her with my worries.

  By the time we returned to our usual schedule, I was hesitant to tell her what Tilton had done. By delaying, I had to some extent deceived her, which I had never done before, at least not about anything serious. Although my reason for doing so was honorable, I was concerned that she would in the future wonder what else I might be withholding from her, that this would in some way permanently change our relationship.

  Of course, I was keeping another secret: Miss Pearl, my guide through dreams of terrors both past and pending. The mysterious woman had instructed me to tell no one of Lucas Drackman, and I understood intuitively that the same discretion was required of me regarding Fiona Cassidy. Honoring Miss Pearl’s instructions meant being less than entirely forthcoming with my mother, and though that wasn’t the same thing as lying, it was not worthy of a well-churched boy. Miss Pearl had given me a piano, yes, but my mother had given me life.

  I adored my mother and hoped that she would always trust me. And so, having delayed telling her about my father’s pursuit of me, I made the further mistake of deciding to remain silent on the subject. Most nine-year-old boys want to be seen as more grown up than they are. Considering that I was now the man in the house, I convinced myself that I alone should deal with Tilton if he came around again, that I could deal with him, and that in this troubled time, I needed to spare my mother from unnecessary anxiety.

  The nation seemed to be sliding toward one existential crisis or ano
ther. Growing casualties in Vietnam spawned street demonstrations against the war, and a seventy-two-year-old woman named Alice Herz had even set fire to herself in protest. The previous year, during Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, marchers were beaten and trampled by horses ridden by state troopers, and a shocked nation watched it all on television. Malcolm X was assassinated, not by racist whites but by other blacks, probably Black Muslims, and everywhere you looked, there was discontent and anger, envy and loathing. Respect for authority was down, crime was up, and illegal drugs were being peddled as never before. Not in our neighborhood but in another part of the city, there had been race riots, as there had also been in Watts, a Negro section of Los Angeles, in which thirty-four people died and whole blocks were burned to the ground. And this summer was no less violent than the last one. A couple of times, I’d overheard Mom worrying about the future with Grandpa and Grandma, not about her prospects as a singer but about my safety and about the war and about what might be in store for all of us. By comparison, my father seemed to be more of a nuisance than a threat.

  The summer wore on, hot and humid and eventful. Search-and-destroy missions in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam led to nightly death tolls reported on the evening news. In July, in Chicago, Richard Speck stabbed and strangled eight student nurses in their dormitory. On the first day of August, an honor student named Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the twenty-seven-story University of Texas tower and with a rifle killed sixteen and wounded thirty, an unprecedented slaughter that alarmed the nation because it felt not like an aberration but like the start of something new.

  Mom came home from her job at Woolworth’s one afternoon and found that I, having returned early from the community center, sat mesmerized by TV-news film of the war and the raging riots. I was only nine, but I think even before I started to recognize the tumult in the world, I already had an awareness of how unstable life could be, born in part from my father’s inconstancy but also from the fact that, in spite of my mother’s undeniable talent and drive, her quest for a career as a singer encountered setback after setback. The L.A. fires, the explosions in Vietnam, the gunfire in both places, the dead bodies in streets foreign and domestic, the crimes of Lucas Drackman and the death-to-come of a girl named Fiona Cassidy, Mr. Lorenzo standing up from the dinner table and dropping dead of a heart attack, the two trash-talking thugs who followed Mom and me through the park earlier in the summer, Speck, Whitman: All of it came together like many different winds joining forces and spinning into one tornado, so that, sitting there in front of the television, I suddenly felt that everything I knew and loved might be blown away, leaving me alone and vulnerable to threats beyond counting.

  Riveted by the spectacle of destruction on the screen, I said, “Everybody’s killing everybody.”

  Mother stood watching the TV for a moment and then switched it off. She sat beside me on the sofa. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m all right.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s just … You know. All this stuff.”

  “Bad news.”

  “Real bad.”

  “So don’t watch it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still happening.”

  “And what can you do about it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The war, the riots, the rest of it.”

  “I’m just a kid.”

  “I’m not a kid,” she said, “and I can’t do anything about it, except sit here and watch it.”

  “But you turned it off.”

  “Because there’s something else I can do something about.”

  “What?”

  “Mrs. Lorenzo’s all alone, so I asked her to dinner.”

  I shrugged. “That’s nice.”

  She turned on the TV but muted the sound. People were looting an electronics store, taking TVs and stereos.

  “There’s something you need to understand, Jonah. For every person who’s stealing and setting fires and turning over police cars, there are three or four others in the same neighborhood who want no part of it, who’re more afraid of lawbreakers than they are of the law.”

  “Doesn’t look that way.”

  “Because the TV only shows you the ones who’re doing it. The news isn’t all the news, Jonah. Not by a long shot. It’s just what reporters want to tell you about. Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it’s all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.”

  On the silent TV, as the face of an anchorman replaced the riots, I said, “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do.”

  The anchorman was replaced by a wind-whipped rain-lashed town over which towered a giant funnel cloud that tore a house apart in an instant and sucked the ruins off the face of the Earth.

  “When weather’s big news,” my mother said, “it’s a hurricane, a tornado, a tidal wave. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, Mother Nature isn’t destroying things, she’s nurturing us, but that’s not what gets ratings or sells papers.” She switched off the TV again. “What do you want to be, Jonah—news or nice?”

  “Nice, I guess.”

  She smiled and pulled me against her and kissed the top of my head. “Then help me get ready for Mrs. Lorenzo. You can start by setting the table for dinner.”

  A few minutes later, in the kitchen, as I was putting the plates on the place mats, I said, “Sooner or later, do you think my dad’s going to be news?”

  She recognized the implication that I thought him incapable of being nice. “Be respectful, Jonah.”

  I figured she knew the answer as well as I did.

  17

  The following morning, after Mom had left for Woolworth’s, I carried the kitchen trash bag to the alleyway behind the apartment building. The sky had lowered, as smooth and gray as concrete, as if the entire city had been roofed over and enclosed in a structure of fantastical dimensions. The air was still when I stepped outside, but as I tossed away the trash and turned from the Dumpster, a cat’s paw of wind came along the center of the littered alley, leaving most debris undisturbed, batting before it only a sphere about the size of a golf ball. It rolled to a stop in front of me, as the breeze died, and I saw that it was an eyeball. Not a real eye, this was one that might have once been sewn to a stuffed toy.

  The orb looked up at me from the pavement. I didn’t remember bending down to retrieve it, but the next thing I knew, I held the object in my right hand. It was made of neatly stitched furry fabric and filled with some spongy material, overall beige, though affixed to it was a circle of white felt that bore a small blue disc at its center. Beige threads, with which it had been attached to some plush toy, trailed from it.

  Perhaps because of the recent strange events and disturbing dreams, I was disposed to regard the eye as if it were not merely litter, as if it must have some ominous significance. As it gazed at me from the cupped palm of my right hand, I didn’t realize that the sounds of the city were diminishing, until suddenly I became aware that a profound silence had fallen over the alleyway. For an instant, I thought that I had gone deaf, but then I heard myself say, “What’s happening?” The silence was real, not a failure of perception, as though the metropolis had never been a human habitat, as if it were instead a vast clockwork mechanism that, after centuries of reliable performance, had exhausted the tension of its mainspring.

  I glanced toward one end of the alleyway, then toward the other, wondering at the absence of traffic. In the warm August morning, many windows were open in the surrounding apartment buildings, though no voices issued from them, no music, no sounds of activity whatsoever. From the sky: no jet roar, no chatter of police helicopters.

  When I turned my attention once more to the faux eye in my hand, I could not dismiss the ludicrous co
nviction that it could see me. It was inert materials, crafted by human hands, just fabric and thread and a bit of colored plastic, and yet I felt watched—and not just watched but also pondered and analyzed and judged—as if every detail this eye beheld was transmitted to some remote and highly curious entity that, but for me, was the only living creature still afoot in this silent city of stilled pendulums and frozen gears.

  As I recount this, at the age of fifty-seven, I remain full of childlike wonder, arising every day to the expectation of mysteries and miracles. When I was nine years old, I wasn’t such an unflagging romantic and delighted believer as I have now become, but that boy possessed the capacity for enchantment and awe that made it possible for time and experience to mold him into me.

  I swear that when I closed my fist around that fabric eye, I felt it roll from side to side, as though seeking some gap between my clenched fingers that would provide it with at least a narrow view of me. As if my spinal fluid had been replaced with a refrigerant, a chill climbed vertebra to vertebra from the small of my back to the base of my skull.

  Moving toward the nearest Dumpster, remembering what Grandpa Teddy had said about juju, I intended to throw the eye into the trash, but before I could fling it away, I realized that the wiser course might be to retain possession of the thing, so that I would always know its whereabouts and could keep it in a container to ensure it remained blind to my activities. If memory serves me well, this bizarre notion came to me less as a thought than as whispered words in the vaguely familiar voice of a woman, a voice hardly louder than a breath in the inexplicable stillness of the city.