Cosmopolis Page 12

  The car's fog lamps were glowing. The river was only two blocks away, bearing its daily inventory of chemicals and incidental trash, floatable household objects, the odd body bludgeoned or shot, all ghosting prosaically south to the tip of the island and the seamouth beyond.

  The light was red. Only the sparsest traffic moved on the avenue ahead and he sat in the car and realized how curious it was that he was willing to wait, no less than the driver, just because a light was one color and not another. But he wasn't observing the terms of social accord. He was in a patient mood, that's all, and maybe feeling thoughtful, being mortally alone now, with his bodyguards gone.

  The car crossed Tenth Avenue and went past the first small grocery and then the truck lot lying empty. He saw two cars parked on the sidewalk, shrouded in torn blue tarp. There was a stray dog, there's always a lean gray dog nosing into wadded pages of a newspaper. The garbage cans here were battered metal, not the gentrified rubber products on the streets to the east, and there was garbage in open boxes and a scatter of trash fanning from a supermarket cart upended in the street. He felt a silence descend, an absence unrelated to the mood of the street at this hour, and the car passed the second small grocery and he saw the ramparts above the train tracks that ran below street level and the garages and body shops sealed for the night, steel shutters marked with graffiti in Spanish and Arabic.

  The barbershop was on the north side of the street and faced a row of old brick tenements. The car stopped and Eric sat there, thinking. He sat for five, six minutes. Then the door croaked open and the driver stood on the sidewalk, looking in.

  "We are here," he said finally.

  Eric stood on the sidewalk looking at the tenements across the street. He looked at the middle building in a line of five and felt a lonely chill, fourth floor, windows dark and fire escape bare of plants. The building was grim. It was a grim street but people used to live here in loud close company, in railroad flats, and happy as anywhere, he thought, and still did, and still were.

  His father had grown up here. There were times when Eric was compelled to come and let the street breathe on him. He wanted to feel it, every rueful nuance of longing. But it wasn't his longing or yearning or sense of the past. He was too young to feel such things, and anyway unsuited, and this had never been his home or street. He was feeling what his father would feel, standing in this place.

  The barbershop was closed. He knew it would be closed at this hour. He went to the door and saw that the back room was lighted. It had to be lighted, whatever the hour. He knocked and waited and the old man came moving through the dimness, Anthony Adubato, in his working outfit, a striped white tunic, short-sleeved, with baggy pants and running shoes.

  Eric knew what the man would say when he opened the door.

  "But how come you're such a stranger lately?"

  "Hello, Anthony."

  "Long time."

  "Long time. I need a haircut."

  "You look like what. Get in here so I can look at you."

  He flipped the light switch and waited for Eric to sit in the one barber chair that was left. There was a hole in the linoleum where the other chair had been and there was the toy chair for kids, still here, a green roadster with red steering wheel.

  "I never seen such ratty hair on a human."

  "I woke up this morning and knew it was time."

  "You knew where to come."

  "I said to myself. I want a haircut."

  The man eased the sunglasses off Eric's head and placed them on the shelf under the room-length mirror, checking them first for smudges and dust. "Maybe you want to eat something first."

  "I could eat something."

  "There's take-out in the fridgerator that I nibble at it when I get the urge."

  He went into the back room and Eric looked around him. Paint was coming off the walls, exposing splotches of pinkish white plaster, and the ceiling was cracked in places. His father had brought him here many years ago, the first time, and maybe the place had been in better shape but not by much.

  Anthony stood in the doorway, a small white carton in each hand.

  "So you married that woman."

  "That's right."

  "That her family's got like money unbeknownst. I never thought you'd get married so young. But what do I know? I have chickpeas mashed up and I have eggplant stuffed with rice and nuts."

  "Give me the eggplant."

  "You got it," Anthony said, but stood where he was, in the doorway.

  "He went fast once they found it. He was diagnosed and then he went. It was like he was talking to me one day and gone the next. In my mind that's how it feels. I also have the other eggplant with garlic and lemon all mashed up together if you want to try that instead. He was diagnosed it was January. They found it and told him. But he didn't tell your mother until he had to. By March he was gone. But in my mind it feels like a day or two. Two days tops."

  Eric had heard this a number of times and the man used the same words nearly every time, with topical variations. This is what he wanted from Anthony. The same words. The oil company calendar on the wall. The mirror that needed silvering.

  "You were four years old."

  "Five."

  "Exactly. Your mother was the brains of the outfit. That's where you get your mentality. Your mother had the wisdom. He said that himself."

  "And you. You're keeping well?"

  "You know me, kid. I could tell you I can't complain. But I could definitely complain. The thing is I don't want to.

  He leaned into the room, upper body only, the old stubbled head and pale eyes.

  "Because there isn't time," he said.

  After a pause he went to the shelf in front of Eric and put the cartons down and took two plastic spoons out of his breast pocket.

  "Let me think what I have that we could drink. There's water from the tap. I drink water now. And there's a bottle of liqueur that's been here don't ask how long."

  He was wary of the word liqueur, Anthony was. All the words he'd spoken were the ones he'd always spoken and would always speak except for this one word, which made him nervous.

  "I could drink some of that."

  "Good. Because if your father himself walked in here and I offered him tap water, god forbid, he would rip out my last chair."

  "And maybe we could ask my driver to come in. My driver's out in the car."

  "We could give him the other eggplant."

  "Good. That would be nice. Thank you, Anthony."

  They were halfway through the meal, sitting and talking, Eric and the driver, and Anthony was standing and talking. He'd found a spoon for the driver and the two of them drank water out of unmatching mugs.

  The driver's name was Ibrahim Hamadou and it turned out that he and Anthony had driven taxis in New York, many years apart.

  Eric sat in the barber chair watching the driver, who did not take off his jacket or loosen his necktie. He sat in a folding chair, his back to the mirror, and spooned his food sedately.

  "I drove a checkered cab. Big and bouncy," Anthony said. "I drove nights. I was young. What could they do to me?"

  "Nights are not so good if you have a wife and child. Besides, I can tell you it was crazy enough in the daytime."

  "I loved my cab. I went twelve hours nonstop. I stopped only to pee."

  "A man is hit one day by another taxi. He comes flying into my taxi," Ibrahim said. "I mean he is flying in the air. Crash against the windscreen. Right there in my face. Blood is everywhere."

  "I never left the garage without my Windex," Anthony said.

  "I am Acting Secretary of External Affairs in my previous life. I said to him, Get off from there. I cannot drive with your body on my windscreen."

  It was the left side of his face that Eric could not stop looking at. Ibrahim's collapsed eye fascinated him in a childlike way, beyond the shame of staring. The eye twisted away from the nose, the brow was straight and tilted upward. A raised seam of scar tissue traversed the lid. Bu
t even with the lid nearly shut, there was a sediment stir to be detected in the eyeball, a roil of eggwhite and mottled blood. The eye had a kind of autonomy, a personality of its own, giving the man a splitness, an unsettling alternative self.

  "I ate at the wheel," Anthony said, waving his food carton. "I had my sandwiches in tinfoil."

  "I ate at the wheel also. I could not afford to stop driving."

  "Where did you pee, Ibrahim? I peed under the Manhattan Bridge."

  "This is where I peed, exactly."

  "I peed in parks and alleys. I peed in a pet cemetery once.

  "Night is better in some ways," Ibrahim said. "I am certain of it."

  Eric listened distantly, beginning to feel sleepy. He drank his liqueur out of a scarred shot glass. When he finished eating he put the spoon in the carton and set the carton carefully on the arm of the chair. Chairs have arms and legs that ought to be called by other names. He laid his head back and closed his eyes.

  "I was here what," Anthony said. "Probably four hours a day, helping my father cut hair. Nights I drove my cab. I loved my cab. I had my little fan that worked on a battery because forget about air-conditioning in that day and age. I had my drinking cup with a magnet that I stuck on the dashboard."

  "I had my steering wheel upholstered," Ibrahim said. "Very nice, in zebra. And my daughter with her photograph on the visor."

  In time the voices became a single vowel sound and this would be the medium of his escape, a breathy passage out of the long pall of wakefulness that had marked so many nights. He began to fade, to drop away, and felt a question trembling in the dark somewhere.

  What can be simpler than falling asleep?

  First he heard the sound of chewing. He knew where he was at once. Then he opened his eyes and saw himself in the mirror, the room massing around him. He lingered on the image. The eye was mousing up where the edge of the pie crust had struck him. The camera cut on his forehead was discharging a mulberry scab. There was the foaming head of hair, wild and snarled, impressive in a way, and he nodded at himself, taking it all in, full face, remembering who he was.

  The barber and driver were sharing a dessert of finely layered pastry glutted with honey and nuts, each holding a square in the palm of his hand.

  Anthony was looking at him but speaking to Ibrahim, or to both of them, speaking to the walls and chairs.

  "I gave this guy his first haircut. He wouldn't sit in the car seat. His father tried to jam him in there. He's going no no no no. So I put him right where he's sitting now. His father pinned him down," Anthony said. "I cut his father's hair when he was a kid. Then I cut his hair."

  He was speaking to himself, to the man he'd been, scissors in hand, clipping a million heads. He kept looking at Eric, who knew what was coming and waited.

  "His father grew up with four brothers and sisters. They lived right across the street there. The five kids, the mother, the father, the grandfather, all in one apartment. Listen to this."

  Eric listened.

  "Eight people, four rooms, two windows, one toilet. I can hear his father's voice. Four rooms, two with windows. It was a statement he liked to make."

  Eric sat in the chair and half-dreamed scenes and wavery faces out of his father's mind, faces levitating in his father's sleep or his momentary reverie or final morphine relief, and there was a kitchen that came and went, enamel-top table, wallpaper stains.

  "Two with windows," Anthony said.

  He almost asked how long he'd been asleep. But people always ask how long they've been asleep. Instead he told them about the credible threat. He confided in them. It felt good to trust someone. It felt right to expose the matter in this particular place, where elapsed time hangs in the air, suffusing solid objects and men's faces. This is where he felt safe.

  It was clear that Ibrahim had not been told. He said, "But where is the chief of security in this situation?"

  "I gave him the rest of the night off." Anthony stood by the cash register, chewing. "But you have protection, right, in the car."

  "Protection."

  "Protection. You don't know what that means?"

  "I had a gun but threw it away."

  Ibrahim said, "But why?"

  "I wasn't thinking ahead. I didn't want to make plans or take precautions."

  "You know how that sounds?" Anthony said. "How does that sound? I thought you had a reputation. Destroy a man in the blink of an eye. But you sound pretty iffy to me. This is Mike Packer's kid? That had a gun and threw it away? What is that?"

  "What is that?" Ibrahim said.

  "In this part of town? And you don't have a gun?"

  "There are steps you must take to safeguard yourself."

  "In this part of town?" Anthony said.

  "You cannot walk five meters after dark. You will be careless, they kill you straightaway."

  Ibrahim was looking at him. It was a flat stare, distant, without a point of contact.

  "You will be reasonable with them, they take a little longer. Tear out your entrails first."

  He was looking right through Eric. The voice was mild. The driver was a mild figure in a suit and tie, sitting with cake in his outstretched hand, and his comments were clearly personal, extending beyond this city, these streets, the circumstances under discussion.

  "What happened to your eye," Anthony said, "that it got all twisted that way?"

  "I can see. I can drive. I pass their test."

  "Because both my brothers were fight trainers years ago. But I never seen a thing like that."

  Ibrahim looked away. He would not submit to the tide of memory and emotion. Maybe he felt an allegiance to his history. It is one thing to speak around an experience, use it as reference and analogy. But to detail the hellish thing itself, to strangers who will nod and forget, this must seem a betrayal of his pain.

  "You were beaten and tortured," Eric said. "An army coup. Or the secret police. Or they thought they'd executed you. Fired a shot into your face. Left you for dead. Or the rebels. Overrunning the capital. Seizing government people at random. Slamming rifle butts into faces at random."

  He spoke quietly. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on Ibrahim's face. He looked wary and prepared, a disposition he'd learned on some sand plain seven hundred years before he was born.

  Anthony took a bite of his dessert. They listened to him chew and talk.

  "I loved my cab. I gulped my food. I drove twelve hours straight, night after night. Vacations, forget about."

  He was standing by the cash register. Then he reached down and opened the cabinet beneath the shelf and lifted out some hand towels.

  "But what did I do for protection?"

  Eric had seen it before, an old pockmarked revolver lying at the bottom of the drawer.

  They talked to him. They bared their teeth and ate. They insisted that he take the gun. He wasn't sure it mattered much. He was afraid the night was over. The threat should have taken material form soon after Torval went down but it hadn't, from that point to this, and he began to think it never would. This was the coldest possible prospect, that no one was out there. It left him in a suspended state, all that was worldly and consequential in blurry ruin behind him but no culminating moment ahead.

  The only thing left was the haircut.

  Anthony billowed the striped cape. He squirted water on Eric's head. The talk was easy now. He refilled the shot glass with sambuca. Then he scissored the air in preparation, an inch from Eric's ear. The talk was routine barbershop, rent hikes and tunnel traffic. Eric held the glass at chin level, arm indrawn, sipping deliberately.

  After a while he threw off the cape. He couldn't sit here anymore. He burst from the chair, knocking back the drink in a whiskey swig.

  Anthony looked very small, suddenly, with the rake comb in one hand, clippers in the other. "But how come?"

  "I need to leave. I don't know how come. That's how come.

  "But let me do the right side at least. So both sides are equal."


  It meant something to Anthony. This was clear, getting the sides to match.

  "I'll come back. Take my word. I'll sit and you'll finish."

  It was the driver who understood. Ibrahim went to the cabinet and removed the gun. Then he handed it butt-first to Eric, a vein flashing on the back of his hand.

  There was something determined in his face, a solemn insistence on one's duty to recognize what is harsh and remorseless in the world, and Eric wanted to respond to the staid grave manner of the man, or risk disappointing him.

  He took the gun in hand. It was a nickel-plated piece of junk. But he felt the depth of Ibrahim's experience. He tried to read the man's ravaged eye, the bloodshot strip beneath the hooded lid. He respected the eye. There was a story there, a brooding folklore of time and fate.

  Steam came venting from a manhole through a tall blue stack, the most common sight, he thought, but beautiful now, carrying the strangeness, the indecipherability of a thing seen new, steam heaving from the urban earth, nearly apparitional.

  The car approached Eleventh Avenue. He rode up front with the driver, asking him to cut off all means of communication with the complex. Ibrahim did this. Then he activated the night-vision display A series of thermal images appeared on the windshield, lower left, objects beyond the range of headlights. He brightened the shot of dumpsters down by the river, adjusting the projection slightly upward. He activated the microcameras that monitored activity on the perimeter of the automobile. Anyone approaching from any angle could be seen on one of the dashboard screens.

  These features seemed playthings to Eric, maybe useful in video art.

  "Ibrahim, tell me this."

  "Yes."

  "These stretch limousines that fill the streets. I've been wondering."

  "Yes."

  "Where are they parked at night? They need large tracts of space. Out near the airports or somewhere in the

  Meadowlands. Long Island, New Jersey " "I will go to New Jersey. The limo stays here."

  "Where?"