City of Strangers (19 page)

'We need a sheet,' says Ben, looking at Claire, who goes into the bedroom: her response is nothing like that which she gave Paul. He finds the switch that Paul could not and puts on the light. A moment later Claire emerges carrying a crisply folded deck of white sheets; it might be all the linen she has.

'Gloves,' he says. He already wears them; Paul doesn't. Once again, Claire vanishes before returning with a pair, black and cotton, the kind that stretch to fit any hand and are usually worn by children.

'Did you touch him anywhere?'

Paul thinks. 'His jacket.' Ben looks at Paul until he understands. Pulling on the gloves, he stoops to wrestle Terence's jacket off him; he has to pull out each dead arm as the fibrous straps of unconsenting muscle roll and flop in his hands. Finally the jacket comes off – leaving only an undershirt that exposes two bare arms, sleeved in tattoos – and Paul sets it on the floor.

'Put the knife in that,' his brother says. 'We'll get rid of it on the way.'

Ben's movements have a decisive economy. He disappears for a moment into the kitchen, from which comes the sound of water running, and returns with a clump of wet paper towels in his fist. He spends a moment cleaning the blood from his shoes; when he is finished he holds a crumpled ball, dark as a cherry. Then he opens one of the sheets, shaking it until the whole white cape billows out; a bulb of air swells in the middle, and it falls with the lazy swoon of a parachute. Paul feels sapped of willpower, ready to do as his brother says. 'Get the legs.' Ben lifts the shoulders and together they hoist the body. It isn't especially large, but the entire middle sags between them, heavy as cement; the arms dangle. They work to balance the body, to account for its irregular distribution of weight, its odd stray parts. They carefully lower him onto the sheet.

Drawing a long breath, Paul lets the weight drain from his fingers. He hears his brother's voice: 'We have to wrap him now.' Paul doesn't move. Instead he watches Claire; it isn't clear to him what he wants to say to her, or what he wants her to say to him. Claire, too, looks directly at him, but it is the gaze one makes across a distance. Again his brother speaks, quiet and firm: 'I certainly don't intend to do this on my own.' Paul bends and takes a leg into his hands. Ben stops to correct him, suggesting a better method of wrapping the body. They begin again.

It has a haphazard appearance. The white sheet, mottled with soily blossoms of blood, looks loose, ready to fall apart. Ben considers this. Finally he says they aren't done; they need garbage bags. 'Black ones,' he says. Claire fetches them, and the brothers, moving faster now, almost a rivery feeling pulsing under their movements, hasten to finish. It looks ready to travel now, even if, to a witness, its contents would be unmistakable.

Claire lives on the second floor. All three gather by the entrance and listen for any hint of movement in the hall. There is only silence. When they open the door the light that greets them is grisly and bright, publicizing everything it touches; the idea of transporting a body through this exposed, echoing space assumes an extra grade of peril. It would take only one tenant coming home at the end of the night to raise the alarm. But they are committed: the body is wrapped, the car parked downstairs. Ben nods, and together they lift it.

As they step into the hall, carefully avoiding the slick of blood, Paul looks once more at Claire; she returns the look, and says nothing. With legs and arms and back tense from exertion, he can hold onto only one coherent thought in the few seconds their eyes are joined: a wretched awareness that it would be easier not to see each other again, not ever, a thought ordinarily enough to burst his heart but which is made even worse by the knowledge that nevertheless they must – that the work of cleaning the apartment is his responsibility, one he will later undertake as an obligation, a matter of fealty, of hopeless principle. The brothers are clear of the door; she shuts it behind them. 'I'll go first,' says Ben, backing toward the lip of the stairwell. They begin the descent. At the turn in the stairs they must lift the body and rotate it like a long piece of furniture. From a hall above spill the spreading, layered echoes of a door shutting. Paul freezes, but Ben shakes his head – no point in stopping. They must go on. Suddenly they are outside. Noise froths near the bar at the end of the street, where voices slosh alcoholic ally back and forth. But Friday-night drunks make poor witnesses, and in any case the brothers have chosen a good moment: nobody's coming from either direction. The car is parked away from the light. Using a button on his key ring, Ben unlocks the trunk: it springs open with a ghastly exhalation. They stand there as Ben uses his foot to push to the back a shovel he must keep in the car for winter. Even then, it seems, the body isn't going to fit, but, with a certain amount of bending and coaxing, it does. Ben slams the trunk. The sound ricochets off nearby buildings, then dies.

His brother doesn't say where he plans to go and Paul doesn't ask. They drive north. They follow the edge of the water, just as the English must have done, and the Dutch, and before them the Indians, and who knows who else. The car's wheels sing crisply along the F.D.R.; white-paneled trucks rise in the rearview mirrors like lighthouses, then fall away. The skyline bulges and narrows above them like a cemetery of giants. The East River is as black as oil, and on its pitted surface floats a swaying, reflected version of the same city, the same swirling lights. A city of millions, New York, like an experiment in the limits of density, the level of proximity ordinary people can stand. It is a city of everything, of every possibility. Paul stares. Windows – some lit, some dark – stare back, and he feels modest, watched.

It is precisely for this reason, he knows, that Ben plans to take them away from the city. He drives at a moderate speed. Traffic is thin on the expressway, and they move easily. Ben still hasn't given a hint of his thoughts. The light across his face changes as they drive under streetlamps, shadows slicing it in different directions. At a glance Ben's features appear typically stony and, tonight, slightly ashen. But Paul notices a new habit of his eyes, an inability to stay focused on the road ahead; Ben isn't normally a man who has trouble holding a steady gaze.

'Are you okay?' asks Paul, aware of how stupid the question sounds.

'I'm just trying to figure out what I tell Beth when this is over.'

They continue in silence, pushing through the darkness between cities. For miles the highway is changeless. Sulking trees; glittering, stoic road signs. The proud thrum of the engine. The hushed fizz of tires on pavement. In the lane of oncoming traffic orphaned headlights blaze into view and a pair of red embers recedes. Paul loses track of time.

Like an outpost in the desert, a ragged, spectral glow materializes a few hundred yards ahead. Road work. Men in bright orange safety vests walk here and there – dozens of them, moving with the fractured slowness of dots on a radar screen. A vent of rubber cones constricts traffic into a single lane. The lonely highway swiftly becomes crowded; cars that had been pushing dully through the night in contented anonymity now line up with the intimacy of teeth in a zipper. They adopt the obedient rhythm of vehicles approaching a checkpoint. A police cruiser idles nearby, its revolving blue and red lights slicing the air like the blades of a helicopter, and an officer wearing black gloves and a heavy cap nonchalantly controls the flow of automobiles. Paul looks down at his own clothes, the spots of blood in his lap and on his front, which in poor light appear colorless, merely dark. He tries to think of them as blotches of spilt water. Work has stripped away the smooth grain of the road and made it uneven; the tires growl and slip. Ben eases off the gas, and both men hear the body change position in the trunk.

They are about to pass through the policeman's watch. Paul's stomach hurts. He looks quickly at his brother, seeking reassurance, but Ben's face doesn't yield to the moment's tension, its terrible element of chance. How easily the car could get a puncture on asphalt littered with construction equipment. A careless driver might knock them from behind. Ben seems oblivious to these scenarios. The only sign of his anxiety is the strength with which he grips the steering wheel: the section of its arc between his hands looks like the bow of a stick he intends to break in two.

They come to a complete halt as a gang of men, ferrying a long object of indeterminate purpose, cross the road and two cars ahead the policeman holds up a hand against traffic. The men are startlingly near, wearing haggard faces, and around them the air churns with breath. Powerful white lamps give their orange vests a crystal radiance, while behind them the night is as still as a photograph. Then they're across. Paul continues to stare until, underneath him, he feels the car gather speed, and once again he and Ben are on their way.

When they go over the state line into Connecticut, Paul looks expectantly at Ben, who senses his brother's thoughts and shakes his head. He explains that he wants to get beyond New Haven before stopping. 'I know the area. Friends live up here.' It seems like a long way to drive but Paul accepts this without protest; he isn't even sure on what grounds he would disagree with his brother, and has only a vague sense that it is a mistake not to rid themselves of the body sooner. Whether or not the decision is a misguided one, he's just grateful not to have to make it alone.

'Thank you,' he says. 'For doing this.'

The ensuing silence is far from companionable. Paul turns away and regards his own sparse reflection in the window. It has the thinness of a pencil drawing, a glimpse of an older self, a harbinger: of tired, scraped-out eyes; of delicate and graying hair; of sunken cheeks, bleached skin, cracked teeth. It comes and goes with the light, like a flickering spirit.

Ben applies more pressure to the gas.

New Haven glows ahead. Living in New York makes one forget the smallness of other cities: as quickly as its lights hatch into view, New Haven is gone, remembered only by the rearview mirror, blurry and quivering, like a rack of votive candles. Not until they are through the city does it occur to Paul that Ben's son is at Yale, that they were only a few turns from the building in which he sleeps. Though he doesn't acknowledge it, Ben knows it, too. With awful clarity and a flash of self-pity, Paul, finding it difficult to look at him again, realizes what he's asked of his brother.

He says, 'You didn't have to come.'

The statement is meant as a question. Ben doesn't speak, but his face, uncharacteristically adrift and washed of all assurance, nonetheless makes the answer perfectly clear: he doesn't know why he chose to help. Paul nods slowly; his lips part, but the apology he wants to give doesn't come out.

After driving for another half an hour Ben signals and takes an exit, and they leave the highway, as around them the road becomes darker, the objects at its side black and fixed.

They are alone on the road now. It took almost no time to remove themselves from the main arteries of traffic; they drive along a simple two-lane route, among only the trees, whose skeletal boughs reach wearily across their path. Paul gets the feeling that soon Ben plans to stop. He does, at a point of visible thickening in the roadside copse, and they sit for a minute, the engine idling, as if waiting to begin a conversation. 'This is the place I had in mind,' he says.

Paul makes no reply; Ben opens the door. Ribbons of sound, slipping in through the broken seal, split apart the silence, then destroy it altogether. The wind. The hard, zinclike odor smolders inside his nostrils.

'There's a turnoff,' says Ben, 'up ahead. It would get us deeper into the trees, but I don't want to drive on dirt – tire marks are as bad as fingerprints. We'll have to get rid of our shoes, too.'

These details of planning, which would never have occurred to Paul, renew his gratitude for the presence of his brother, who, wasting no time, opens the trunk. It is still there, bathed in a light as dark as yolk; at the ends the surplus corners of the garbage bags are slack, innocently bunched, and elsewhere the material is stretched to an ironed smoothness, a menacing tension in the plastic suggesting the contours of its contents. Following Ben's lead, Paul takes one end; they lift, treating their cargo gently, as if afraid to damage it. Paul's legs become spongy. He has to grasp the ankles very firmly, squeezing hard enough so that they don't slide out of his hold; it requires immense concentration to keep the tendons taut in his fingers and wrists. The plastic is surprisingly slick and wants to slip away. It seems that he won't be able to go on, but then Ben begins to move.

At the side of the road is a knee-high metal barrier; they step across in unison. Ben, who carries the heavier end and walks backward, is patient, waiting to make sure that Paul has control before proceeding. They go on, faster now; navigating the woods and the uncertain terrain, they begin to move in sympathy with each other.

Branches appear like dark diving birds, rasping the side of Paul's face, and with every step he accumulates a disastrous clumsiness. He trips on an exposed root and swears. The word sounds unusually loud. How little noise there is, silence congealed a palpable substance: a true quiet, the kind not found in cities. Ben glares at him across the length of the body.

'We need to get,' says Ben, pausing awkwardly for breath, 'far from the road.'

Paul nods, though he doesn't know how much longer he can keep up his end. He's holding the body much lower than he was when they took it from the car. His back is on fire, his knees creak and ache. Each step leaves him freshly aware of this or that obscure joint and tendon. Sweat pours out, finding clefts in his back, collecting between his hip and the waist of his pants. Groping to regain his grip on the body, he thinks of Ben, his extra twenty years. Paul can hear the severity of his brother's breathing, which has grown in urgency over the last few minutes, and until now he hasn't thought of Ben's heart, of its fragile condition and the punishment it must be taking. Perhaps it's even worse than Ben let on – at any moment his brother could succumb to a feverish quaking in his chest. Paul watches him closely, inspecting him for a sign of trouble, a look of anguish.

A few feet on, Ben stops. Paul braces himself for the worst. His brother doesn't collapse. Instead he looks once over his shoulder and says: 'Here.' They are far too exhausted to respect their cargo, to lower it solemnly. It falls, landing on a bed of frozen leaves – the leaves of this year and the year before that, all the leaves the ground has not yet digested, a decaying canvas in gangrenous shades of green and brown. The smell rises heavily, faintly sweet. They have almost no light.

Ben says, 'I have to get the shovel from the car.'

'Shouldn't I come?'

'Stay here. Otherwise we might not be able to find it again.'

'How are you going to find me?'

There's a pause. 'Just wait here.'

Paul does as he's told. The stripes of muscle on his back, the cables that stretch under his arms, aren't able to release the coiled tension of exertion: his body won't forget the weight of the one it has been carrying. Obscenely, he feels hungry. He can't remember when he last ate; thoughts of food harass him. Time passes. He worries suddenly that his brother doesn't plan to return. Paul listens closely for the sound of a car's engine. He hears nothing, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is difficult to imagine that Ben will reappear – Paul has been left alone with the body of the man he killed. Against his side he feels the vibrations of his phone, and he fumbles through buttons and pockets and the folds of his coat. Flipping it open, he puts the phone to his ear and says, 'Hello? Hello?' No one's there. It wasn't Ben's voice he was hoping to hear, he realizes, but Claire's, and when he looks at the screen he sees that it isn't a call at all, only the phone's warning that its battery is about to die. The plastic at his feet snickers in the wind. The phone sits in his hand like a stone. He hears, at last, the nearby crunch of crusty earth.

'Ben?'

Gripping the shovel by its throat, he appears. Without a word he stops alongside the body and drives the spade into the ground, tearing up a hunk of earth. He pauses to straighten his glasses before bringing down the shovel again; the motion is abrupt and hugely violent. He digs. Against the resistance of cold dirt his movements grow ragged. He attacks the ground with a rough determination; by the gathering choppiness of his breathing Paul knows the strain this exercise is putting on his brother. Ben stoops to pull out and move away a large rock that obstructs the shovel. He seems to have little regard for the mess, getting himself dirty with surprising carelessness; but Paul's brother has always believed that something within himself is fundamentally clean. Paul steps forward, arm outstretched, offering to take the shovel. Ben's face is glassy with sweat. He does nothing at first. He breathes heavily and looks at Paul with obscure eyes. At last he gives it up.

Ben has split apart the top layer of earth, but Paul's first attempt to deepen the hole goes badly; the shovel punches through only a few inches of dirt and his bones clang painfully from the shock. The digging grows easier once he knows what to expect, and he finds a cadence; the work becomes mindless. Vaguely he senses Ben's nearby presence, and it makes him slightly self-conscious, his brother assessing the quality of his effort; Ben says nothing. After forty-five minutes of steady labor, Paul has stripped from the earth a hole maybe three feet deep, which appears to be about the size they need, though he can't stop himself from worrying that it isn't enough. Soreness condenses in his shoulders. He smears the dew of sweat across his forehead and opens and closes his hands, trying to stretch out the ache of the shovel's handle.

Ben watches him, mouth clamped in an impatient half-scowl.

'This is taking too long,' he says.

They stand in position, one at each end of the body, and lift it up. When it's directly above the hole, the body simply tumbles in; it fits. Paul stares at it, unable to move, until startled by the sensation of a hand on his upper arm: he turns and looks into his brother's face, a face disheveled by sweat and exertion, which even in the dark shines with a pink, athletic hue. But the expression there isn't easily categorized – it isn't unkind, nor is it necessarily fraternal or consoling. Ben, after holding this pose for a moment, takes back his hand.

Paul makes no effort to take over as Ben retrieves the shovel and fills the hole again with dirt. It is a much quicker process than the digging and soon the ground is level again. They gather leaves to cover the empty space; the excess dirt they scatter around. They step back and evaluate their work: the ground is artificially level, in a plot of otherwise wild, unused earth, but it would be difficult for a casual observer to realize what lies beneath the soil in this desolate, arbitrary place. They could not have done better.

Claire goes to the twenty-four-hour Korean grocery store and leaves with two plastic bags stretched almost to breaking: sponges, liquid soap, steel wool, Ajax, carpet cleaner, glass spray, paper towels, a six-dollar mop. It was obvious that she had been crying, but the man was kind enough not to say anything. The weight of the bags feels solid – a familiar thing, cleaning – but even before she reaches her apartment, as she climbs the stairs, as she pictures the scene there, a sense of impossibility fills her movements. The bags tug at her fingers and the feeling of encumbrance travels up her arms, pressing down on her shoulders, her back, even the top of her skull. Instead of getting to work as soon as she's inside – the blood on the floor seems even darker now – she drops the things on a table and goes to the couch, although to sit down she first must fix the cushions.