Читать книгу The Book of Stone - Jonathan Papernick - Страница 11

3

Stone crossed under the BQE without checking for traffic, Zohar’s footsteps fast at his heels, pursuing him. This was his executioner, Stone thought. He would be the end of Stone, but Stone would never speak a word. He stumbled on a curb, righted himself, and continued to run, never looking back. All his organs and muscles and bones worked in tandem now, his nerves vibrating with the pure, uncut rush of adrenaline. The invincible fear was back with greater force than it had been in years. But, Stone thought, if he could just outrun Zohar, just shake him now, he would never again be haunted by anything.

The keys to his father’s red 1980 Thunderbird jangled in his pocket, and he knew what he had to do as he crossed silent Myrtle Avenue with its fried-chicken joints, check-cashing windows, and grim bodegas. He needed to drive, to drive, to drive, to get away, to put everything behind him, to drive and drive and drive and leave his past and everything he ever knew behind. This was not death, this was life, and he was rushing toward it in a breathless sprint. With a furious leap, he reached his father’s car, found the lock, tore the door open, and slid inside. Stone started the ignition and floored the gas, cutting across the sidewalk, nearly knocking over a battered mailbox. Yes, he thought, yes, breathing in his father’s smell on the soft upholstery, so magnetic, so powerful, so redolent with life he was overcome. As he turned right onto Washington Street, green ailanthus and sycamore trees flickering past, he saw in the rearview mirror the face of his father, his unforgiving eyes flashing through his half-moon glasses. He knew he was speeding. His father had never had a ticket in his entire life, and he was showing his displeasure now, but Stone could outrun anyone, didn’t his father know that?

On his right, he passed the abandoned Graham Home for Old Ladies, its windows shuttered like coins on the eyes of the dead, and the skeletal jungle gym in the empty playground. Stone pressed his foot on the gas, passed under the giant cruciform shadow bleeding from the roof of Christ: Light of the World Church, and raced through a red light at Lafayette.

His father was stuck in the mirror, and Stone needed to get him to stop hiding in the glass, certain he was going to step out and devour him whole. “Forgive me, forgive me,” Stone shouted.

The red neon hands of the clock atop the golden-domed Williamsburg Savings Bank tower read some hour that looked like a crooked V for victory, and he raced on, singing the Columbia fight song his father had taught him with his first words. He sang as he drove, crossing from neighborhood to neighborhood, lights off now, a knife cutting through the darkness. He had shaken Zohar but the Judge remained in the mirror, fragmented into a mosaic of expressions—joy, sadness, disappointment, fear, all mixed as one. He continued to sing “Roar, Lion, Roar!”—the fight song of his father’s alma mater, a school Stone had refused to attend just because. Davka, as his father would have said. And Stone sang and he sang and he sang but his father would not join him and would not go away until, finally, Stone wrenched the rearview mirror off the windshield and tossed it out the window.

Stone’s adrenaline had flamed out. No sense of victory buoyed him, just deep exhaustion. All he wanted to do was sleep, but he was lost. He drove in a fog of confusion until he could not drive anymore and he shut the car down, sprawled out across the front seats, and fell into a restless sleep.

WHEN HIS FATHER was selected to preside over the Court Street Riot trial, during Matthew’s junior year of high school, Matthew was unimpressed; his father’s accomplishments had long ceased to mean anything to him, serving only to draw the Judge farther away. He became even more silent and introspective, rarely uttering a word. He locked himself in his study for hours at a time and slept at his desk. Matthew thought his father was selfish, self-absorbed, and dull, his ceaseless immersion in legal texts and documents antithetical to life. As the trial came closer and protests became louder, calling for the Judge’s ouster, Matthew hid from reporters and sometimes stayed out all night with one of the girls impressed by his newfound celebrity. One girl asked Matthew whether the Judge would go easy on a landsman. Seeing his father on the nightly news, Matthew realized the Judge did not belong to him but to the state, the public, the media—he was his father in name only. It was ridiculous to think this man, larger than life and vibrant on television, was the same silent, moody pile of nerves who holed up in his study as if it were a defensive bunker. But, sometimes, Matthew missed his brooding presence at home, and he went to the Kings County Supreme Court building in downtown Brooklyn. The Honorable Walter J. Stone sat at the front of the courtroom beneath the engraved words: LET JUSTICE BE DONE THOUGH THE HEAVENS FALL, his half-moon glasses pushed down on his nose. He spoke with a firm tone, questioning both lawyers at length. This was the man Matthew knew, the man who had been absent around the house for so many months. He spoke with force and confidence and authority. Sitting there in the courtroom, Matthew arrived at the absurd realization that the Judge was father to all those people present—no wonder he had no time or tenderness for his son.

The defendant, Isaac Brilliant, was slim and wiry in his black suit, slouched in a chair beside his lawyer. Matthew did not remember the jury or the makeup of the spectators, but he did remember the exhausted New York Times reporter slumped next to him, doodling in his notebook, again and again, around the words that would constitute his lead paragraph in the next day’s paper. Quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, the words read, “The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”

Not long after, when the selection of jurors exploded into a full-scale controversy and the word jurymandering entered the New York lexicon, Matthew believed his father had gotten what he deserved for his cold arrogance in overriding the prosecution’s challenge to the defense’s jury choice. It was the first time in his life Matthew had seen his father wounded, battered by a world he strode through like a giant, brushing aside problems with ease. The Judge was questioned many times by the district attorney’s office, walking the humiliating media gauntlet, passing signs reading BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS and BASSAM DIDN’T ASK TO DIE as the clutch of TV cameras pressed in on him. The Judge was composed and stoic as he walked, but Matthew realized he had lost control of his personal narrative, his carefully constructed mystique smashed to pieces, when he heard the young television reporters begin each day’s coverage with, “. . . son of notorious gangster Julius Stone . . .” It was then that Matthew finally allowed himself to feel sympathy for his father. Papa Julius had laid this minefield long ago, and only now was the Judge forced to confront it.

A man and a woman from the district attorney’s office rang the Stones’ doorbell one night after dinner. They both showed their DA badges and asked Matthew to answer some simple questions. They related to the Judge’s character and were general questions he finessed with ease—he said nothing of substance. The thin, crane-like woman asked point-blank, “Did your father, Walter Stone, knowingly approve, as a member of the jury at the trial of Brilliant v. State of New York, a man he knew would not be able to fairly render a decision considering the facts presented to him?”

“I don’t know,” Matthew said.

“Is that your answer?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know,” Matthew said.

“Can you repeat that, please?” the man said, taking notes. “Did your father, Judge Walter Stone, knowingly approve—”

“I don’t know.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

The Judge walked in the front door as the pair from the DA’s office was leaving.

“What are you doing in my home?” the Judge said to the man, who was fiddling with his briefcase.

“Just asking a few questions. We’re leaving now, Judge Stone.”

He stepped up close to the man and said, “Get out of my house.” Then, turning to the woman, he added, “This is my private home. If you want to speak with me, you know where to find me, but leave my family out of this.” He spoke in a measured tone, belying the irritation he must have felt. “Now,” he said. “Good-bye.”

When they were gone, Matthew sat frightened at the foot of the stairs. His innards steeled themselves, hardened with fear. The Judge lit a cigarette and held the smoke a long time before expelling it into the air. “What did they ask you?” he said, turning to face Matthew.

Matthew told his father everything he remembered, and as he did so he watched the Judge’s face to make sure he did not slip up.

“Is that all?” the Judge said, a long gray ash hanging at the end of his cigarette.

“They asked if you knowingly approved a juror who would not be able to render a fair decision.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I said, ‘I don’t know.’”

The ash fell to the floor.

“‘I don’t know’?” the Judge said, his voice rising. “When the district attorney’s office asked you if your father knowingly approved a juror who was dishonest and corrupt, your only answer was ‘I don’t know’? What is the matter with you, Matthew? Don’t you have a brain in your head?”

“Dad, you don’t understand.”

“Matthew,” the Judge said, cutting him short. “I don’t think you understand how serious this is. You’re graduating from high school soon—you’re going to be a man. You have to know these things.”

After a moment, Matthew said, “I made a bad choice.”

“Blood is not a choice, Matthew, yet somehow, somehow you managed to circumvent thousands of years of genetics, biology, and history in one fell swoop.” Turning away and speaking as if to a private audience, he said, “He’s a modern miracle, a revolutionary wunderkind. He’s stormed the Bastille and brought down the ancien régime.”

“I made a mistake,” Matthew pleaded.

“Matthew, have you ever read a play called Othello by a man named William Shakespeare who had the answer to everything? I suggest you read it. Particularly act 2, scene 3, lines 281 to 284.”

“I made a mistake,” Matthew sobbed.

“No mistakes,” the Judge said, walking toward the open door of his study. “There can be no mistakes.”

MORNING ARRIVED LIKE a hammer to Stone’s head, and he was wide awake, animated with pain through every quarter of his body, little more than a flaming nerve, as if he had no skin at all. He had slept the entire night sprawled across the front seats of the Thunderbird. His clothing was sodden with sour sweat. The new day promised worse than the day before. His logical mind said he had not seen his father, he had been overtired and his imagination had played tricks with him, his unconscious desires and fears manifesting themselves as vivid hallucinations.

It was then he realized where he was. He had, as if guided by an invisible hand, returned home to his father’s apartment, parking in the street right out front. The Judge’s bedroom window was lit up, and Stone was seized by terror, his throat clenching in a stifled scream, until he remembered Pinky had refused to turn off the light when they had left, saying it didn’t fucking matter since nobody was paying for it anymore.

The Judge had worked so diligently to drill into Stone the ideals his hero Jabotinsky had preached: the concept of hadar—beauty, respect, self-esteem, politeness, faithfulness. Stone displayed none of these qualities. He had willfully made himself ugly in the eyes of the Judge. He had spent his life ignoring the wisdom of his father, chasing after disastrous sexual entanglements, clutching the sinking lifeboat of hopeless relationships and cheap marijuana highs. He believed in nothing. He was nothing. Slumped in the front seat of his father’s Thunderbird like a homeless thing, he realized he was in danger of becoming less than nothing, an absolute unexalted negative clinging to this world simply through the vagaries of biology and a deep-seated stubbornness. But there he was in front of his father’s apartment, and he knew he had arrived there for a reason. Stone had been so distressed about the state of the trashed apartment that all he had wanted was to gather up his father’s precious books and keepsakes and leave as quickly as possible. But this was not a random breaking-and-entering. Simple vandalism was not the goal. Nor did the man in the Mets cap have anything to do with this. He had money. He was no second-story man. The fact was, he had wanted the books and yet the books remained. The answer was so clear now—the break-in was about his father’s meds. The Trinidadian hospice nurse, Mavis, who had been coming twice a day for months to check the Judge’s vitals and to ensure his morphine drip dosage was correct, had begun pressuring the Judge to move to a palliative care clinic to receive round-the-clock attention. “Judge Stone, your quality of life will be greatly improved with a team of specialists working to make you comfortable. It will be the best for you.”

If Stone knew one thing, he knew the Judge wanted to live on his own terms, surrounded by his books; he would never submit to any form of institutional care. The Judge, furious his reading had been interrupted by her repeated requests, beckoned Mavis over to his bedside and said, “I won’t have some community-college-educated mammy tell me what is best for me.”

“But Judge Stone, you are not well,” she said.

“And you are not welcome.”

She left immediately, never to return. But in her haste, she had left behind the lockbox in which the Judge’s medications were stored, his IV dilutions, his pills—benzodiazepines, fentanyl, morphine.

Stone still had the apartment key in his pocket and he opened the front door, afraid not of what he would find but of what he wouldn’t find. Mavis had hugged Stone good-bye and wished him the best, but he was certain now that her friends from East Flatbush, eager to even the score and make a nice profit, were the ones who had broken into the apartment. The place smelled of stale sickness and sounded hollowed out, echoey without the walls of books to absorb the noise. All the mirrors had been smashed, and Stone picked up a fragment, saw the state of his face, wrecked by grief and exhaustion, and dropped the shard to the ground. He was afraid to go into his father’s bedroom, and had asked Pinky to gather anything worth saving so he wouldn’t have to enter the place where his father had breathed his last breath, but now he had no choice if he wanted to find the lockbox of medication.

A deep sense of unease penetrated him, and he froze at the doorway as if some psychic force were preventing him from entering his father’s room. But the pain throbbing behind his eyes, his nerves electrified with hurt, was so oppressive he forced himself to enter—one foot first, then the other—and he was in. The ceiling light glared against the bright morning sun sifting in through the windows, and he flicked the light switch off.

Stone recalled the times he had seen his father drift away as the morphine entered his system. For the longest time, the ever-stubborn Judge had been loath to take anything that would affect his mind, keep him from his reading, but during the last weeks he could no longer sleep without the morphine drip. He had seen his father’s face soften, his eyes rolled back in his head, and Stone had seen something like joy. Now he wanted to go to that place, to float away on a river of light where pain was nothing but a rumor.

The lockbox had been smashed open and tipped on its side, but Stone was surprised to find none of the medication was missing. The intravenous bags of morphine sulfate had all been cut open, their contents puddled on the floor, but the prescription bottle was not damaged at all and it was still half full with orange 60 mg tablets. The pills called to him with an irresistible force. He saw his father’s name on the Duane Reade bottle and a sticker that read: “Side effects may include . . .” Fuck it, Stone thought.

He dropped a pill into his hand and, heart stammering in his chest, crushed the pill beneath his heel. Stone dropped to his knees, pinched a nostril, and snorted the powder off his father’s parquet floor.

Oh, the torment is over, Stone thought, a glowing warmth radiating through his whole being—massage on an atomic level. The pain dripped off him like the wax of a guttering candle, a most profound dissolution of self. Freed of his body, he was weightless, sleepy, and he floated to his father’s bed. Stone did not hesitate to lie down where his father had died; his mind was calm, soft as putty. The ceiling was melting in beautiful transparent crystal stalactites, and Stone contemplated them, trying to understand their meaning. The edge had disappeared from everything; even the itching on his elbow and abdomen was magnificent, orgasmic, because he could finally scratch the itch he had had for years, an itch he hadn’t even known was bothering him. He fell deeper and deeper into the bed, his senses emptying out, and as his eyes slipped closed, something or someone lay on top of him, holding him in a weightless, tight embrace as it pressed its mouth against Stone’s lips and sucked the breath out of him.

When Stone awoke, his left cheek and shoulder were sticky with fresh vomit. Nauseated and full of fever, Stone shivered. He realized he was lying in his father’s bed, the spot where he had died, and he dry-heaved over the side. He had to get out of there, but his limbs were numb and heavy. It hurt to breathe, his lungs packed with fluid, a terrible thick phlegm in his throat. What an atrocious awakening, to find himself alone in his father’s deathbed. He still clutched the pill bottle in his hand and debated whether to snort some more to take away the horrible hangover, but he was too weak to open the childproof bottle.

The sheets smelled sour and Stone itched all over and he just wanted to leave this place and never return. His father’s cancer was metastasizing within his own body now, and he knew if he didn’t climb out of the bed in three, two, one, he would die there. He was overwhelmed with fatigue, but he managed to find his feet, the room whirling around him. Stone made his way to the bathroom faucet, stuck his mouth under, and drank until his whole body was cold.

He climbed into the Thunderbird, rolled down the windows, and slowly, slowly made his way back to Pinky’s.

Pinky was standing outside his apartment on the sidewalk, smoking and talking shit with the homeboys from the Walt Whitman Houses, who were in their usual places, playing cee-lo on the sidewalk, sweaty piles of dollar bills clutched in their hands.

“What the fuck happened to you last night?” Pinky said, trotting over to Stone, who was having trouble parallel parking the car. “You just up and disappeared.”

Stone wanted to go inside and lie down and die a little, ease the oppression of his headache, but Pinky reached through the window, popped the lock, and climbed inside. Stone asked him what he was doing.

“I need your wheels.”

“I am really, really sick,” Stone said.

“Don’t come crying to me, pal. That’s what you get when you drink too much.” He chucked Stone on the shoulder. “At least you got laid last night, right?”

Now, in the bright light of afternoon, a piercing headache thumping in his skull—the ultimate reality check—Stone wasn’t even certain Zohar had followed him out of the bar last night.

“Where the fuck were you?” Pinky said. “You smell like shit.”

“It’s a long story,” Stone said.

“Well, I don’t have time for a long story, and I’ve got stuff to do.” Pinky hung his head out the window and spat. “You know, you’ll never get into this spot. Not in a boat like this.”

“Where am I supposed to park?”

“Slide over, let me drive.”

“This is my father’s car,” Stone said.

“You are fucked up. You’re in no condition to drive anyway. Just take a look at you.” Pinky saw the rearview mirror was gone and shook his head in disgust. “Slide over, shitbird.”

They switched places and Stone noticed with a creeping sense of disquiet that the hood of his father’s car was broadly dented, as if a large sack of potatoes had been dropped onto it. He was certain the exterior body of the Thunderbird had been absolutely pristine for the entirety of his father’s ownership. As far back as Stone could remember, the Judge had taken great pains to keep his car in immaculate condition. First the mirror and now this, Stone thought, a tidal wave of nausea gathering strength in his belly. His head pounded.

“Look at that,” Stone said.

“What?” Pinky said.

“The goddamn dent,” Stone said. “On the hood.”

“Where?” Pinky said. “I don’t see no dent.”

It bothered Stone more than it should have. The car was nearly twenty years old; it was bound to take its lumps driving the potholed streets of Brooklyn, but his father had managed to avoid any such damage. Stone could not imagine how it even got there.

“It’s right there,” Stone insisted.

“I don’t see it,” Pinky said. “Just chill the fuck out.”

“You must be blind, if you can’t see it,” Stone said, noting the contours of the impression, shaped, he thought, like one of the Great Lakes or an amoeba. “Forget it. Nobody’s driving, then. Let’s go inside. My head’s killing and I’m going to puke.”

Pinky slammed his hands onto the steering wheel. “I’m driving and that’s it. There’s nothing there.” He jumped out of the car and slammed the door, the sound cannonading through Stone’s head like a nuclear blast. “Look,” Pinky said, running his palm over the glossy sheen of the Thunderbird’s hood. “Nothing. Nada. No fucking dent.”

Pinky climbed back in the car and pulled a baggie of weed out of his pants pocket. He packed a bowl and handed it to Stone. “Listen,” Pinky said. “You need to fucking chill. This will make you feel better. I guarantee it.”

Stone put the pipe to his lips thinking, it’s there, it’s still there.

Pinky screeched onto Myrtle Avenue and floored the gas. They passed Fort Greene Park and the dreary brick towers of the Whitman Houses, stopping short for red lights. They turned left at Flatbush Avenue and Pinky gunned the engine through downtown Brooklyn. Stone slumped in the passenger seat, tried to spark the lighter, and failed. “Do I have to do everything?” Pinky said, lighting the bowl for Stone.

Stone drew in the smoke and held it, feeling afraid. What if this headache was a tumor? What if it got worse and worse, until his head split open from the pain? Where was the bottle? He wanted to pop one of those pills, to get back to the warm floaty place he had been. The insides of his eyelids itched, one of his kidneys itched, and some place in the center of his brain itched, but he couldn’t find a way to scratch them. He must have nodded off because when he next looked out the window they were driving along streets Stone had never seen before, and he had no idea how they had arrived there. Skinny, stunted trees stood naked before brownstones crumbling from age and neglect. A clutch of old Puerto Rican men sat on milk crates, flipping cards onto the sidewalk.

Pinky pulled the car over on a crooked one-way street where cars sat double-parked and a hydrant leaked water into the trash-littered gutter. “Back in a minute.” Pinky slammed the Thunderbird’s monstrous door. He crossed the tilted slate sidewalk and walked up the steps of a brownstone stripped of its facade. The walls were gray and rutted, with rusted ribs of iron showing through. He disappeared through a battered green door.

The dent was still there on the hood, the car as lurid as his impoverished surroundings. Stone fought the urge to close his eyes in the hopes it would just disappear. But out of the corner of his vision, he caught a group of pigeons rising from the roof of a building across the street. They formed a pattern against the sky, undecipherable, shifting and turning and finally breaking up into smaller groups and landing on an adjacent rooftop. It was fascinating how they moved, together and then apart, as if some sort of higher magnetism controlled their movements. How wonderful it would feel to be part of something like a flock of pigeons, to move with such grace and ease, to just know the correct thing to do.

Pinky returned to the car and they stopped at several more places, each stop more bleak and depressing than the last. Stone slipped deeper and deeper into himself. He imagined the pigeons were following, and each time the Thunderbird came to a stop, he tried to count and catalogue them, his mind doing anything to avoid the indentation on the hood. The birds all looked alike to Stone, but he was sure they were always the same ones. Were they following him, or was he following them?

Pinky drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other, a tightly curled fist, holding a cigarette, which he smoked with intensity and portent, his brow furrowed in deep concentration as he inhaled the blue-gray smoke. They passed one of R. R. Nation’s storefront Brotherhood Ministries, a sign emblazoned with the words, TRUST NATION. HE WILL LEAD YOU!

A long black car that looked as if it had just rolled off the lot pulled up at the curb in front of the Brotherhood Ministry and two smartly dressed black men stepped out—they were tall and broad-shouldered, sturdy like former college football players. Stone told Pinky to slow down, and Pinky pulled over to the side of the road and asked Stone if he was going to throw up. From a distance, the two men looked to be moving in slow motion, as if grooving to their own private sound tracks. One of the men opened the passenger door and out stepped the Reverend Randall Roebling Nation, immaculate in a blue pinstripe suit, his hair gleaming in the afternoon light. Stone regarded Nation, watched him walk with the arrogance of a complete fraud who has managed to fool the world.

“Jesusfuckingchrist. Stop scratching yourself,” Pinky said. “You okay?”

“He’s alive,” Stone said. He hadn’t even been aware he was scratching at itches all over his torso and arms. “And my father is not.”

“Let’s get out of here. We’ve got one more stop.”

This was just too much for Stone to handle, and he told Pinky he wanted to go home now, right now. Something was haunting him, everything was haunting him, and he just wanted to drift away into a dreamless sleep and wake up free of his past.

“You know, I think my father would still be alive today if it weren’t for Nation.”

“Fuck Nation,” Pinky said, starting up the Thunderbird. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Take me back now,” Stone said.

“We’ve got one more stop, and I’ll take you back.”

A few minutes later, Pinky parked the car on a side street. Stone sank down in the seat and closed his eyes, hoping sleep would take him.

“Come on,” Pinky said. “You’re coming with me.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“No, you won’t.”

They walked a few blocks in silence, Stone feeling winded, emptied out. He had no idea where they were, but the simple act of walking shook him somewhat from his lethargy. A breeze blew past, a hint of ocean salt in the air.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Here,” Pinky said.

They stood before an old Art Deco movie marquee, its chrome oxidized and stripping in places, a three-story tower rising from the top. The burned-out remnants of the word PALATIAL were faintly visible. At one time it had been arranged vertically in neon bulbs, but the bulbs had all been smashed. The title of a long forgotten movie from the late seventies clung beneath the words ELC ME TO T E ALAT AL.

Layer upon layer of movie posters covered over with handbills, advertisements, and announcements had been peeled away from the wall at a corner, revealing burnished chrome beneath the phonebook-thick agglomeration of glue and paper. The windows had long been smashed and the booth behind the bronze cage was filled with assorted detritus, including a haphazard pile of plush velvet chairs, their torn seats the result of age and vandalism. The door, by contrast, was new and was the type one might find on a suburban home, with its raised moldings, mail slot, and knocker. Pinky knocked twice on the door, and it opened after a moment.

He shook hands with an unshaven man who must have weighed three hundred and fifty pounds; his close-cropped skull was shaped like a warhead and his tiny eyes looked cruel. What was Stone doing here? This creature was absurd. What was this beast supposed to be, an idiot, a prophet, a warning? His eyes were so small, like pencil dots on a blank sheet of paper, and Stone stared into them, trying to decipher what, if anything, was behind them.

“He’s here to play?” the man asked Pinky, with a lumbering Russian accent.

“No. He’s with me.”

The lobby was stripped and bare, and a clutch of middle-aged women in gaudy housedresses pressed forward toward the candy counter. A sign read: OASIS BINGO—CARDS, DAUBERS, CHIPS, WAITERS, CUSHIONS, ETC. alongside a list of prices. The whole scene before Stone’s eyes was grotesque, and he had the urge to run, if only his body would agree.

“What is this?” Stone said.

“I’m here to make sure no one cheats.”

“And why am I here?”

“You’re here because you’re here,” Pinky said, allowing no room for response. He threw an arm around Stone’s shoulder as they passed through a curtain into an auditorium. An oppressive wall of cigarette smoke burned Stone’s eyes.

“B-12,” a gruff voice said into a microphone, echoing through the hall. “B-12 vitamins. Take ’em every day.” A false ceiling hung dangerously low; banks of fluorescent tubes lit the room with a greenish glow. Stone was shocked to see that the original seats had been plucked from the sloping floor of this vast theater, and folding card table after card table had been set up to accommodate what must have been at least four hundred people.

“N-41,” the caller said. “Forty-one. A year that will live in infamy.” He coughed rudely into the microphone.

Dozens of heads bobbed up and down, in sync. They sat waiting for the caller to pull another number, their necks bent like supplicants, heads dropped like Christians at prayer.

“I-30,” the voice on the stage called. “That’s a thirty.”

Stone followed Pinky as he wound through the rows of tables. He walked with more of a swagger than usual. The players were mostly women, white and Hispanic and something else. They looked like grown-up parochial school dropouts. Many of the women were old enough to be grandmothers, and some wore nets in their hair, cheap dye jobs burning against the greenish light. In the taut silence of the room between calls, Stone realized these people had prematurely gone to their graves; a walking death that was more impulse than desire, their lives flaming out beneath the low fluorescent sky.

“N-43.”

Stone caught up with Pinky. “What’s going on?”

“Just stand right there for a minute,” Pinky said, throwing his arm around him again, flashing what he thought was a charming smile. “Don’t move. Just stand there.”

“I don’t feel so good,” Stone said. The ceiling pressed down on him, his senses overwhelmed by the humming babble of voices. “What is this?” His mouth was so dry the words barely came out.

“I am their worst nightmare.” Stone smelled a strong musky odor emanating from Pinky’s body. “Half the players are addicted to the fuckin’ game—welfare cases, unemployed, and losers—it’s gambling for the lower classes. A quick fix.”

“O-61. Maris, sixty-one in sixty-one,” the caller said.

“Like going to the racetrack,” Pinky continued. “Except there’s no bookies and no ponies. But it’s serious shit. They cheat, they’re out.” Pinky shot a sharp glance at a woman who sat before a half-dozen cards, a plastic troll at the head of her table. “On average, I would say they drop over fifty bucks a pop in here.”

The entire scene was incomprehensible to Stone, and he managed to say, “That still doesn’t explain why I’m here.”

“O-75,” the caller said.

“Bingo! Oh my God. Bingo.” A woman moved with a speed and dexterity that belied her bulky form. A collective groan rose from the room as the woman rushed to the front to verify her card. A woman in a HEAVENLY MOTHER OF GOD T-shirt ripped up her cards, threw the pieces in the air, and muttered, “Shit on a stick.” A woman wept quietly before a spread of cards. A man in a heavy ski jacket and hat called out “I ga a goo one.”

There was some invisible creature under Stone’s skin, tormenting him, and he wanted to peel his skin back and find that little bastard. Terminate, with extreme prejudice. His heart beat deep within his body, a slow, distant banging of a drum.

“All right, all right,” the caller said. “Let’s play blackout bingo. Winner gets the big payout. Mark your cards. Be careful now.”

The crowd buzzed in anticipation, raucous chatter bouncing off the chrome and ebony walls.

“Okay, boys and girls. Eyes down.”

There was instant silence.

The next game began with an increased intensity. Muttered prayers and curses floated through the air, a collective desperation voiced by the bingo players. Pinky moved with martial precision among the tables, his pale body stretched out like a piece of gum pulled from a child’s mouth.

“G-33. Thirty-three rpm.”

A woman with crossed fingers scanned the array of cards before her and slammed her hand onto the table.

“B-5. Still alive.”

The room spun like a carousel, a phantasmagoria of grotesque faces melting in and out of focus, slowly at first, then faster as the caller barked out letter-number combinations with a mystical inscrutability as if the correct combination would solve some eternal riddle. Rows of lights glittered above the tables, so pretty, like precious gems, and Stone wanted to go to them, hold them in his hands, press his lips to them, but could not, suspended as he was in a sticky, weblike darkness.

HE LAY ON the cool floor of the bingo hall. Pinky’s face came back into focus, as if through a rippling sheet of water. Stone’s head pounded in a new way. He must have passed out and hit his useless skull on the floor. The caller matter-of-factly said, “B-8. Don’t be late.”

“What the fuck,” Pinky said. “You okay?” He signaled to somebody behind him in the far distance—an ambulance? A hearse?

A small crowd had gathered around Stone. A woman leaned in and asked if he wanted a glass of water. This would be a perfect time for somebody to shout, “Is there a doctor in the house?” But a doctor was not likely to be among this crowd.

“I’m dying,” Stone said.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Pinky said, pulling Stone to his feet. His legs were rubber bands, his tongue swollen like a dried-out sponge. As his eyes came back into focus he saw the overhang of a balcony beyond Pinky’s profile, pushing closer like the prow of a great ship. In the darkness, he thought he saw the outline of figures moving about behind the brass railing. He saw a glimmer of light, as if someone’s glasses had caught a snatch of light in their lenses.

“I’m taking you home,” Pinky said.

“I-17. Sexy and seventeen,” the caller said, and the bingo game continued.