Читать книгу Widow's Dozen - Marek Waldorf - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt seemed to tear the top half of his head off. The new Santa’s laugh was that awful. Terrifying. A baritone but not Ho Ho Ho but a laugh that was also a cry for help. Help me! he laughed, and the children on his lap were reduced to tears or fits of screaming.
“Do yourself a favor,” said the manager, as he cut the check.
“I know,” Russell interrupted with a grimace. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Bud, if you’ve heard it before. Jesus.”
So seven years pass. Seven holiday seasons and not one rolls by but Russell Richards doesn’t feel the pang. Temperatures go down, the trees go up with their tinsel, trinkets and blinking lights, and Russell starts to get angsty. Do yourself a favor. It’s a voice inside him he can’t turn off. Instead, why should I? he replies. It’s his catechism. A never-neglected routine. But the little ones still take fright of him.
That seventh year started off on two left feet—first a foot of snow over Thanksgiving, but later that December, three days of late Indian Summer, days so apocryphal and mild they seemed to belong on the April calendar. The remaining leaves clenched into little brown fists that shook at the buses wheezing past. Nannies and new moms backed the plastic off their baby carriages, neighbors returned to stoops, old men to the windows out which they’d stared their summer enmity, and Russell was moved to join in.
He joined like one granted a reprieve.
The passengers on the F train were good at avoiding eye contact. There was sincerity in their avoidance. It wasn’t easy for them because Russell was a scene unto himself. He seemed to be handing out licenses to stare.
He grabbed a window seat but couldn’t help but spill over. Although people were standing, nobody contended for a share of the seat next to him. He peered out on avenues laden with the dust from truck traffic and a mix of warehouse blocks and blocks of three-to-four-story brownstones, with their raked roofs all but touching. The train elbowed west by northwest before heading underground.
They waited in the darkness of the tunnel for the dispatch signal. The other riders dreamed fitfully inside the car, in those empty minutes, in the intimate anonymity of the delay. Their impatience hatched side projects, the obligatory groans of why me god, not again, motherfucker, why now and it don’t end, and the other insect racket embedded in their ears. Adjectives latticed across different faces: they appeared to him as on a sign. The signs ran the length of the car, all variations on the same theme. ESCAPE FROM EVERYDAY LIFE. Buy your bank tickets online. There was no way of escaping them. Look, don’t look, they’d find a way to seep in, look out the window, bare bulbs illuminating graffiti tags on the crossed lattices of pillar and post. Things were scurrying off behind. It was rat heaven out there. All the rats killed above ground, rats from all over the world, ended up in these tunnels, enjoying the filth and darkness, the human world enunciated as noise and delicious offal.
Russell repeated his catechism and that particular slice of heaven held off for a while longer. After several false starts, the train roused itself and staggered on.
Slant, facing diagonal from him, near one of the sliding doors, a toddler in a stroller watched three grown-ups who were making faces, cooing and hedging behind their fingers. The two women were obviously related, an old lady and her rosy-cheeked, middle-aged daughter—the giggling man next to them, not—but which of them the boy belonged to, Russell couldn’t guess. The antics of the grown-ups were so well choreographed the child might have been communicating telepathically. Puff your cheeks out! he’d command, and they would obey. They would huff and blow and pout and puff and their eyes would squint, like they were about to eat dirt sandwiches.
Then, without warning, the child turned his little extent in Russell’s direction. There was a moment of indescribable intensity as he stared and Russell stared back. Russell felt weak with hesitancy, hope, nausea. He was sure the spell would be broken and the crying begin (with a phenomenal howl, if past experience was any judge) but this time things were different. The infant was stopped in his tracks, but surprise turned into puzzlement and he kept staring, not sure how to place Russell in his limited but growing repertoire of the uncanny.
Was this one a threat? The kid was, in his preverbal way, undecided.
And then he turned aside, to the two cornrowed men and woman moving purposefully down the aisle. Their hands were filled with flyers: she was handing them out while the men were sticking sheaves of ten or more into the bottom corners of the overhead signs. “You think you’re messed up,” the woman said as she handed Russell the slip of paper, but it wasn’t clear if she was talking to herself or to him, asking or telling, rebuking or commiserating. It didn’t matter. The child hadn’t cried! The child hadn’t cried. A victory of who knew what order of magnitude.
SEE THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR NEIGHBORS’ EYES, he read. SEE YOURSELF! DON’T BE FOOLED BY APPEARANCES EVER AGAIN!
Remote viewing? But why not? It wasn’t for the crazies anymore.
At 42nd Street, the people in the car poured onto the platform, out between two wedges of waiting passengers. Russell was a sizable impediment, but he was carried along, washed up one set of stairs and out the stiles and up another into the even warmer air outside. The humidity seemed to make the dust hover more than usual, filling in the thin winter light. The symmetry of Manhattan is the symmetry of a grid. You see it even in its name: m, nn, aaa, tt, h. It isn’t a grid superimposed upon the clutter. The grid is the game. The stream of people divagated once they got above ground, and there were different currents, or causeways, to step into. Russell hesitated and so was jostled more than once.
“Watch it.” An immoveable obstruction. “Lameass.” A blockage. “Fuckinutjob.” Snowbanks sank to the pavement, their runoff backed up above the drains at the corners. The salt thrown down to melt the ice was being carried down into the earth, beneath the trembling pavement and into the tunnels, corroding the cables wrapped snugly underground—like the city was melting back to life. The sidewalks couldn’t fit all the people there were, and the impatient ones would shear off the curb, one eye over their shoulders.
The superstars of the WB empire were being dragged along the sides of buses. They lounged and bullshitted and laughed their way through the city, stopping every two blocks to let people on and off. His eyes traveled the length of these enormous reclining bodies. He walked slowly but couldn’t help getting bumped from behind. It was very exhausting. Streams of shoppers, the working dead, tourists and their kids, the whole busy world. Sincere young women with petitions tried to waylay the ones who were trying hardest to avoid them. Russell’s sister had been one of their ranks once, back before she’d given the world and him Max.
At present he came to a shelter from the streets, a corporate lunch-hour park slotted between the high sides and backed by a fountain, and he dropped into a wire-latticed chair with droopy armrests. Russell wiped his face with a damp sleeve. A young man sat down next to him, and of course it wasn’t long before he started to stare.
Muzak turned softly from both sides of the building. I was alive then, thought Russell, I knew that song before it became this booming elevator and side-of-the-building business.
Clouds encroached upon the narrow wedge where the sky was, thirty-six stories above them. The kid was talking into a strange outdoor phone. “Sure, sure. I used to breathe through my mouth, too, you know. Want to know how I stopped? Yeah, well, I’ll tell you anyway.” He paused to listen. “Yeah. I don’t care. Somebody showed me. Then they bribed me to follow their example. Whatever your objective, whatever the lesson, bribery is always the right tool.” He paused to listen. “Of course it worked. Just what are you saying?” He paused to listen. “No. Look, you deviant. I was yanking your chain.” His eyes had a foxy edge and his cadences, if not exactly self-aware, lacked that so-go-ahead-listen indifference most urban loudmouths opted for. His carefully groomed stubble spoke more to his conceit than the suit did. The suit was expensive enough to appear anonymous. While he talked, he started paying more and more attention to Russell.
“I gotta go,” he said, more than once, but the person on the line wasn’t accepting that. It could have been anybody. Finally he clicked off and turned to Russell. “Do yourself a favor,” the young man said.
“What did you just say?”
“I asked whether you could do us both a favor.”
“Look. I’m not looking for unnecessary conversation.”
“Okay,” the young man permitted himself a twinkle of amusement, “but you certainly are dressed for it.”
Russell Richards was perspiring heavily into his red suit padded out for the cold. Beads of sweat ran through his white hair and down through his combed-out beard and down his neck.
“Look,” he said.
* * *
“What a coincidence!” the young man interrupted. “My name’s Fenwick.” He stuck out his hand and left it there for a while. Longer than most people would have bothered.
“Look. Whatever you want, I’m not interested.”
“You’re too uncomfortable for company, hey—cool. I just wanted to catch my breath. No rush, right?” He buttoned up his phone, which was still making noise—talking to him—and dropped it into a breast pocket. Then Fenwick leaned in with the air of one providing a confidence. “But ever since you stepped away from your responsibilities, my group’s had to come to the rescue. Vital Vision Sectors. That’s us! That’s all I meant by what a coincidence! No harm done. So you can see why I’d be so excited, I mean beyond the normal reasons. Father motherfucking Christmas! All we’re doing is filling in, of course. Just for the time being. Nobody’s trying to replace you. What choice did we have? We felt it’s our civic duty.” He made it sound like doody. “You’ve walked the streets, but have you seen how it’s really done? Earned the trust of the people? Did you make Christmas fun?
“Hell yeah you did! That’s why I sit here in awe of you. I take one look and I see beyond those rags, to the glass of milk and the cookie, and I think, fuck. How the fuck did he—sorry, no offense, Father—do that? Inspire the level of trust so that you, a perfect stranger, could shoot down Johnny Nine-to-Five’s chimney, into the family room, and leave these secret gifts—gifts, the word seems so strange, looking at you—from a total stranger from who knows where, underneath a tree, and then, while on your way out, back up the chimney, you take a little time out. What for? Why to fill up on milk and cookies. Milk and cookies! If we tried that shit—but we did. I mean we tried! And it was the cops when it wasn’t multiple man ones. So, first of all, the first thing I wanted to do was to pass over some respect. Respect is due. And so forth. So. So—here we are.”
It wasn’t the speed of the spiel or the quality of insinuation that had Russell stupefied but the fight melted out of him. It was hard to say what it was exactly. His spirit, issuing as flopsweat, trickled to and ran down his trouser legs. Fenwick looked at the ground, overjoyed, and said, “to just think. Think—a puddle! The water in one of these city puddles holds dirt from how many shoes? How many do you think? Hundreds? Or thousands—?! Can you imagine the human petri dish that just one puddle represents? Did you ever want to get down on your knees, in the middle of the street, in front of one of these puddles, and look—and I mean really look—into it. But I suppose you step over your puddles, Old Nick.”
“I do,” said Russell, growing more and more miserable, “I mean I have. Millions of times.”
“So what kind of rare coincidence is this? I mean I’ve got time on my hands as well. Why not unburden yourself. How did you decide to go around imitating a saint? No offense. I don’t mean you’re an imitation. Your belt is really something. What do you say? Haven’t you ever wanted to spill your guts to a sympathetic stranger?”
Never, Russell was about to say, but all of a sudden, he found himself starting to confess—how he thought his sister had no business having a child so close to forty. “. . . and on her own, like that. I told her so. So what? Why would that make me love Max any less?”
“Of course. Why should it?”
“That she would think that.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Oh, don’t clam up. I’m sorry I said that. We had a moment of trust there, didn’t we? But I pushed. Tell me if I’m being too pushy but, hey, I’ve got a fantastic idea! How about my gift to you is you don’t have to guess any longer. No more guesswork, no more uncertainty about was it her or you who was crazy or just plain wrong. Right? How about it? This is what I have to offer. Right now, right here, but totally at your own pace. Certainty. On a completely free trial basis. No strings, no cost.”
“Just go away. In return for what?”
“Like I said, it’s free. Where’s your Christmas spirit, Nick?” While keeping up his confident chatter Fenwick was fiddling with the brass clasps on his valise. He unsnapped one but the other seemed to be stuck.
“I don’t know,” said Russell.
“So fine. What? What don’t you know? I swear they make everything these days to break. Let’s see, yep—China again. If it doesn’t fall apart in a year or less, somebody’s head is gonna be on the chopping block. Doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to spend. It’s not about the money. Goddammit! Almost had it there. No, it’s the powers-that-be not wanting us to form material attachments. When did everything get so zen? What don’t you know? Ah. Got it.” He opened the case by inches. He was suddenly cagey, trying to reach in and rummage around with his fingers. This, of course, had the effect of making Russell want to see more of what was inside.
He started to open up. “I mean,” Russell said, “I loved the boy every bit as much as she did. I could have been a father to him, at least more than an uncle. He idolized me when he was three. Couldn’t get enough. And Nancy was the one who was jealous. Of her own brother! We could have raised him together. We did. For the first five years we were a team. What—” Russell stopped when he witnessed the extent of the confusion in Fenwick’s briefcase. Papers, index cards, badly gnawed-on pencils, gnawed-at apple cores and wreaths of dried-out flowers—he didn’t know what kind, but they’d turned a crusty orange. A grade-school primer. A sticker that said MEAN PEOPLE SUCK. Banana bunches of keys. Old, gunked-up coins. Some had got stuck together. An eclectic mix of DVDs, some pirated versions of recent releases, some Criterion quality, some he’d never heard of, and some, judging by their titles, pornos. The Wizard of Odd was one. The cover had a jockey-sized Svengali knee-deep in the genius of his trade. A tornado tore out of the Arts & Leisure section of the Times. There were Times and Posts and News from cities all over the nation, the front pages anyway. Generally speaking, the headlines weren’t good. It was the telescoping of a vast disorder.
“I’m no mind reader,” said Fenwick, “but my bet’s on Max. Something tells me he was behind your falling out with your sister.” This was Fenwick’s first mistake. Or should Russell say “Fenwick”? Because Fenwick obviously wasn’t his new companion’s name. Unlike the guesses that had come before, this one was too good— spot-on but with an edge of gloating around it, subtle but there. Maybe not the, but here was a devil so far gone he could take his comfort only in the suffering of others. Whatever could be wrung from such encounters. Probing old wounds. He had more than a gift for it. He’d made it his calling card. He roamed the city in search of victims. The incompletes. The defenseless slobs. A psychic vampire. Somebody like Russell would be like a buxom virgin to him.
“I know you,” said Russell, and tried to shift his chair around, away from the intruder, only it had been nailed into the concrete. “I see who you are.”
“And you think that makes us even? You know me. Shit, get off your high horse.”
“No.”
“No. No what. What?”
“Go away.”
“Of course. How can you believe in other people’s good intentions when you no longer believe in yourself?” Fenwick pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the briefcase and held them out to Russell. They were star-shaped and the powder-blue rims had glitter on them. “Everything you saw in that case? That’s my workload for just one week. One week. On the positive side, think about all the lives I get to touch. Kismet! Just try them on, will you? For eight seconds. A second out of your life. Eight seconds and I’ll leave you in peace. I’m not prepared to give up on you just yet.”
But somehow he didn’t make it sound like a threat, or even a promise. He was very good at what he did, this Fenwick. Hadn’t Russell always imagined the moment like this? When everything would change.
That’s what I am, this character seemed to be implying.
A chance to set things right, for the second (or seven hundredth) time.
He’d taken up the costume at first for the extra money. That was all it was back then, just a costume. The resemblance, even in his fifties, had been striking, uncanny even. After his mom died, Russell and his half-sister had moved into the Lower Slope brownstone she’d bequeathed them along with a small inheritance. By cautious investment, pooling their resources and renting out the top floor, they were able to achieve the modest dream of their generation: early retirement. To never have to set foot in an office again. To celebrate, Russell started growing a beard. He’d always been impressed by the forked monstrosities of the nineteenth century prophets, but when his own appeared, it was not just as white as snow—but just as fluffy. He had a workshop in the basement where he did carpentry, small projects—stools, mock ducks, doll- and birdhouses—and she took up worthy causes, most to do with the environment.
Through one of these, she landed herself a boyfriend, briefly. David stuck around long enough to get her pregnant, but when she decided to have the boy, he skedaddled to the opposite coast. But amicably enough to make Russell suspicious. Russell, who’d always heard Nancy tell it like anybody who brought a child into the world in the shape it was in would be perpetrating some kind of monstrous crime, thought there was too much symmetry behind it all. He double-checked the joint account, but found no evidence of an “arrangement.” But that wasn’t surprising. Twelve years younger, but she possessed his stepfather’s devious intellect.
It was a long pregnancy but a short labor, a C-section, and another three days to regain her strength. Russell visited her and Max at the off-white maternity ward every day, but the family feeling didn’t hit him then. It was when she brought him home from the hospital. It was the moment she carried the boy up the front steps and went through the door, into the brownstone. Ours. A threshold was crossed. He was so tiny, adorable, so helpless you couldn’t help but love him like your own better self but unformed and still open to impression. When he wasn’t colicky or hungry or scared, he was an angel. But he surprised them both by how much a little baby can run up the expenses. Russell tried the department-store gig in Max’s third year, expecting it to prove impossible or a joke, but what he discovered instead—besides how much a top-notch Claus can earn—was his calling. “Of course,” Fenwick interrupted. The knee to dandle them on had already been broken in. That was when it dawned on Russell. He understood why he’d been so lonely his whole life. He had been relating to the wrong kinds of people. It was kids he was meant for—the children.
But could Nancy just admit to being jealous, she could not. She had to criticize. Insinuate that his affections might be somehow warping to the boy. In summer, she would say, “Why can’t you wear a shirt when you’re handling him?” “Because it’s hot!” he would yell back. “Well, you’re getting your sweat all over him.” That was just one example. Not wearing a shirt! Was he so disfigured he needed to keep his shirt on at all times? When Max got older, she would ask, “What have you been telling him?” “What?” “I don’t want you talking to him about people being put in stocks.” “Why?” “Because it’s weird—and it’s disturbing him.” She implied that he was causing Max’s nightmares. Or that the nightmares the boy was obviously having—Russell heard him screaming, totally hysterical, every night—were Russell’s fault somehow.
She was getting Max so upset he started to believe these lies as well. It was a mounting campaign. And because Max was a child, everything came signposted far in advance, everything that at that age was sure to be fatal. Russell felt the distance between them growing. It was just a phase, he told himself, but it wasn’t. It was his sister’s neurotic moodswings that chipped away at her boy’s love for him. In despair, he banished himself to the basement, for longer and longer periods of time. And then, after the last rebuff—so childishly insensitive Russell found himself incapable of not bearing a grudge—suddenly everything was past the point of repair. “He’s not ours!” he remembered Nancy shrieking at him, from that remote time, with impossible violence. “He’s not yours to punish! God, Russell, do yourself a favor, and get some help!”
When they moved out, his own nightmares returned. He was in hell. He ate a potato chip, and it tasted like hell. It was like biting into paper. The salt burned into his tongue. The Juicy Juice he drank was all aftertaste, but it did nothing to slake this horrible thirst. His, he believed, was not a self-made hell but one imposed from the outside. Those who ensnared him, glib imitations like “Fenwick,” they were put here to test him. His sister foremost. And for what? He could conceive of only one answer, and in the grief of his betrayal and his days and nights of lonely suffering, the answer quickly grew to possess him, into assuming the shape of a saint. He would show them both by becoming Father Christmas.
But the little ones all took fright of him.
He felt the burden of shame his costume was carrying from the rank sweat and picked up the glasses Fenwick had set down, and he put them on. The lenses fogged up immediately. The blur got bigger until it included all Midtown, the whole city melting into facets of yellow and orange while his eyes watered with the effort to make sense of them. Tears of concentration ran down his cheeks. He’d all but given up—it couldn’t have been more than five seconds—when the riddle resolved itself. He passed into focus and saw he was looking at himself. It was extremely disorienting, but he appeared (so it seemed) through his companion’s eyes. Now “I” am Fenwick. But as soon as this thought popped into Russell’s head it popped back out because only the eyes were affected. The other senses stayed his. They were keener, in fact. With sight deposed—“thrown over,” in a sense—touch, taste, smell, and sound all fought for the priority spot. There was confusion in the scuffle, some mix-and-matching. The whisper of anise in Fenwick’s voice, like he’d walked out of an Indian restaurant. Or himself, salivating through his skin, watching himself surrender, drip by drip, to this creature of intrusive and irrational empathy, back into the pavement, drop by drop, the salty sweat of one word dripping off his tongue. “Holy—”
“By all means,” Fenwick said keenly. “Look! It’s apt to change your life.”
The ingenuity of his bluff was staggering. Russell watched himself take the flyer out of his pocket and look down to reread the printed words on the consignment, but of course that was impossible. Fenwick put out a hand and Russell didn’t hesitate, he passed along the slip of paper as one would a ticket to a nearby Broadway show, and through Fenwick’s eyes he read—recomposing with barely a glance the impossible words, while watching the light which surpasseth understanding break, burrow down and dissolve into this intensification of painful enlightenment pictured in front of him—BEHOLD YOURSELF! “Remote viewing,” he said. “Sure,” said Fenwick, without batting an eyelid, “we’re all over that.” He tucked the ticket away in his briefcase. And at first it was like boric or hyperbolic acid, the vision burned his fragile idiom that bad. It seared the wonder in the flesh dissolving there in front of him, and it was his, all his. Fenwick wouldn’t shut his eyes. Or was it all in innocent fun? Russell’s only other choice was to take the shades off, but knowing it was that simple was the hook. But what was he looking out at, eyes filled with this odious but unarguably genuine empathy? The memory that worked on him and worked on him, to this day. The little pippin. The hypogriffin of seven years’ disaster. In his candy-cane-colored outfit, he was making all kinds of surprising faces, trying to win back his child.
“Uncle Russ,” Max had said, “you’re silly.”
“But of course I am,” said Russell. “All grown-ups are fundamentally silly.”
“But why?”
“Because,” said Russell, “think about it. There are really only two ways to be an adult. Silly. And scary. It comes about through our genes.” But wasn’t there the man of sorrows as well? Mortal after all. He saw the face tackle his memory. Russell took off the shades and rubbed his eyes. He rubbed for a long time, reluctant to open them. When he did, Fenwick was gone, but the glasses were still in his hands. The sudden emptiness of the plaza, augmented by the many chairs casually arranged around the slablike tables, but, in fact, riveted in. At the back, a curtain of water fell stiffly down the front of a distressed metal tablet. Quick claques of pedestrians, tourists and suits, walked past on the sidewalk, but nobody turned in. In the break between sides, cars streamed and stopped. Local and entertainment news on the minute wrote itself across the red news tape banners, across wall-eyed windows opening onto snapped-together cubicles, with the different speaker systems disposed of—camouflaged—around the plaza.
The music deferred to the vacuousness of their physical attainments, while also secreting something familiar. Russell knew it. He had heard the original version thousands of times, but couldn’t remember the name. Not the name, but for reasons impossible to fathom the lyrics did come back to him. The people were passing faster than the cars, as a rule, and there were more of them, and they seemed more diffident and fragmentary as a result. Clips of color, of material yearning. For well you know that it’s a fool (he remembered) who plays it cool by making his world a little colder. And all the words returned, right up until the chorus.
Meanwhile, Fenwick’s speeding south on Fifth, feeling pleased with himself. More than a little. What a stroke! Luck like that is like winter lightning—but what about his technique? He’d been very in the moment. Twice this guy had almost wriggled free, but he’d reeled the fish back onto the sidewalk. It’s so rare to run into a presenting type that you imagine they’ve all but ceased to exist—the Napoleons, the Christs, the Lincolns, Washingtons, Kennedys and supporting presidents, the prophets, martyred saints and holiday enunciations. He, Fenwick, believes himself to be an original. His walk certainly is—ditto his glide, angling sideways with one shoulder, with the arms coddled loosely, not swinging back and forth too much. The pace is brisk but conveys no actual hurry. His wending is a private-in-company performance, but he devises his way between clients and potential customers—who are keeping reasonably clear of him—while also avoiding the man- and weather-made cracks in the sidewalk. In fact, he is making all kinds of minor metaphysical calculations as he passes different pairs of eyes, eyes connecting with his or not. He keeps pace with these early impressions, it’s easy, the UES thoroughbreds on top of Gramercy winsomes, cracker pontoons, wasp-waisted naifs, Japanese jokers and the more durable European duos so undeniable in their eager fashion nativities, corkscrewed after or plaited arm in arm like the boroughs that collide—but more naively outwards. But they step into his path and on behind, quarreling sports with their peers, while beside him angry workers circle an enormous inflated rat, both claws extending palms-down, as if to be slapped. An intricate nest of buttoned-up white collars. But the intricacy lies in how they slowly circulate around one another, taradiddle, square-dance style, using oncomers as moving bales of hay. It fascinates! Between beheadings—a blur of rapidly vibrating thumbs—some kids swap Texas instruments. This man’s face narrows to a knife-edge while the wings of the moustache work outward like a vise. The competitive beauty of an almond-eyed office assistant, her slick hair brown but suggesting red. The veteran collecting small bills behind the cardboard sign that keeps him and his companion in misery, a brute shepherd mix, hungry, scatters his blessings indiscriminately, whether others provide or not. But who’s really at fault here? Is “society” standing in his way? Hardly. There’s something pleasant to look at in everybody, Fenwick finds—he gets a tiny sexual charge from every last one of them. But he gives back even more. What a job! He puts his mouth to an ear and blows. A few temporarily disintegrate, but not Fenwick—nor upon him—who deftly skirts the supplicating cap. But then he nearly loses himself, just as the sunlight loses heed behind the office towers, siphoned across avenues, down rundown chasms, first between Orthodox Jews in dark winter jackets and then between a Con Ed crew wrestling with cones, bibs and orange helmets, decked-out ministers of old Broadway vaudeville beside shock-haired deliverers and middle-aged PAs, location men, a white rasta with primped yellow dreads, gaffers, presumptuous Latin teenagers, lumpen Isises warily noted by Hoboken bluebeards in suede trenchcoats gleaming with close-of-day moisture, a coffee-carrying woman hurrying forward in a business suit and black tights as the sunlight forks along the cross-streets of the low forties, a swaggering subaltern in pink pinstripe, executive wool skirts, a couple of leg-warmers, knitters, tall and short—the scarf reaches down to her waist—and all of them, all, every last one, is talking to him- or herself. They are fashionable, glitzy, greedy, and hairy, but they are sublime as well. They call up the voices of friends cut off from them forever but surviving in the ether that surrounds Manhattan. “Insha’Allah.” “Gotcha, man. Gotcha.” “. . . but that wasn’t the extraordinary thing. The extraordinary thing . . .” Fenwick flips it around. And when he’s done with the friction of minutely loving these people—loving them for who they appear to be, not are, for the typological questions they pose, with their wonderful suggestions of intricacy—he finds he has arrived at the preening lens of the times that is Times Square. Here the giants and saints of this world compete for Russell’s attention—who, from his perch ten corners back, is peering through those discombobulating glasses. But now he is able to see as Fenwick sees them, as funny adjectives that hope just keeps stringing along. Circulating. So many but all communicating to themselves. But the thing is you didn’t worry! Because the best cure for hope there is is laughter. It rolls up out of his belly and spills out of a pure spring tapped from the source, an enormous surcharge, out over the intersection—but actually funny. Santa’s new laugh is terrific. Focused and infectious. People stop and smile at him, but it’s a good smile. They are curious and engaged, all but prepared to fit themselves into his unkillable good cheer. As laughter goes, it’s hearty but far from seeming deranged. It binges on that last shot of sunlight scraping down the aisles. It obeys the worn-out brightness of that moment, and the theatrical bills of Mid-town. But here. Now.
