Like Life (23 page)

“The woman in front of us says he’s the guy wanted for the Gowanus Canal murders. See the police boats circling down there?” Two red-and-white speedboats were churning up water. One of the helicopters hovered noisily above.

“Oh, my God,” Mamie said again, and pushed her way through the crowd. A white heat burst in her brain. A police motorbike pulled up on the walkway behind her. A policeman with pistols got off. “It’s someone I know,” Mamie repeated to people, and elbowed them aside. “It’s someone I know.” She held her purse and bag in front of her and pushed. The policeman was following close behind, so she pressed hard. When she came to the place directly across from the man, she put down her things and lifted her knee up onto the rail, swung her leg over, and began to crawl, metal to skin, toward the outer reaches of the bridge. “Hey!” someone shouted. The policeman. “Hey!” Cars sped beneath her, and an oceany wind rushed into her mouth. She tried not to look down. “Rudy!” she called out, but it seemed feeble in the roar, her throat a half throat. “It’s me!” She felt surrounded by sky, moving toward it, getting closer. Her nails broke against metal. She
was
getting closer, close enough, soon, to grab him, to talk to him, to take his
face in her hands and say something about
let’s go home.
But then suddenly, too far from her, he relinquished his grip on the cables and fell, turning, his limbs like a windmill, vanishing into the East River below.

She froze.
Rudy.
Two people screamed. There was a whirring noise from the crowd behind her, people pressed to the railings.
No, not this.
“Excuse me, m’am,” shouted a voice. “Did you say you knew this man?”

She inched backward on her knees, lowered herself to the walkway. Her legs were scraped and bleeding, but she didn’t feel them. Someone was touching her, clamping hands around her arms. Her purse and bag were still where she’d left them, leaning against the cement, and she jerked free, grabbed them, and began to run.

She ran the rest of the way across the bridge, down into the ammonia dank of a passageway, then up again to an old ruined park, zigzagging through the fruit streets of the Heights—Cranberry, Pineapple—along the hexagonal cobbles of the promenade, along the water, and then up left, in a ricochet against the
DON
’
T
WALK
lights. She did not stop running even when she found herself in Carroll Gardens, heading toward the Gowanus Canal.
No, not this.
She ran up the slope of South Brooklyn for twenty minutes, through traffic, through red lights and sirens, beneath the scary whoop of helicopters and a bellowing plane, until she reached the house with the bird feeder, and when she got there, scarcely able to breathe, she sank down on the concrete lip of its fence and let out a cry, solitary and strangled, into her bag of songs.

THE
AFTERNOON
DARKENED
. Two Rosies shuffled by, ignoring her, but slowing down, winded. They, too, decided to sit on the low wall of the fence, but chose to do so at some distance. She had already slid into the underclass of the sick, she knew, but they didn’t recognize her yet. “Are you OK?”
she heard one Rosie say to the other, putting her box of flowers down on the sidewalk.

“I’m OK,” said her friend.

“You look worse.”

“Maybe,” she sighed. “The thing is you never know why you’re any particular place. You get up, you move. You keep thinking there’s some other way than this.”

“Look at
her
,” snorted the friend, motioning toward Mamie.

“What?” said the other, and then they fell silent.

A fire truck clanged by. Sirens wailed in outrage. After some time Mamie got up, slow as an arthritic, clutching only her purse—her jar still in it—leaving the records behind. She began to walk, stumbling on a raised crack in the pavement. And she noticed something: The house with the bird feeder didn’t have a cupola at all. It didn’t even have a bird feeder. It simply had a sign that said
RESTAURANT
, and there was a pigeon on it.

She walked by the Rosies and gave them a dollar for an iris. “My,” said the one handing it to her.

At the apartment, the lights were on and the padlock hung open like a hook. She stood for a moment, then kicked at the door with her foot, banging the inside knob against the wall. There was no other sound, and she hesitated there in the doorway, a form of desire, a hovering thing that cannot enter a room. But slowly she took a step, the heel of her hand pressed to the doorjamb to steady her.

He was there, hair dry, wearing different clothes. His arms were raised over his head, the stray torn like a mast in his hands on top. He was moving slowly around the place, as if in a deep Oriental exercise or a dance, the cat investigating the bookshelves.

“It’s you,” Mamie said, frozen by the open door.

The pumpkin stench of the bathroom wafted toward her. The uriney cold rushed in from behind, carrying with it the flap
of helicopters. He turned to see her, brought the cat down to his chest. “Hi.” He was chewing on a difficult bit of candy, pieces of it stuck in his teeth. He pointed to his cheek, grimacing. “Jujubes,” he said. “They play with your mind.”

The television burst on: people chanting together, like an anthem for cola.
We are the Undying. We are
 …

He turned away and lifted the cat up high again, close to the golden moldings of the ceiling. “Cats love this,” he said. His arms were long and tireless. In the reach, his shirt had come untucked, and the soft bare skin of his waist flashed like a smile. “Where have you been?”

There was only this world, this looted, ventriloquized earth. If one were to look for a place to die, mightn’t it be here?—like some old lesson of knowing your kind and returning. She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love. She tucked the flower in her blouse. Life or death. Something or nothing.
You want something or nothing
?

She stepped toward him with a heart she’d someday tear the terror from.

Here. But not now.