Saving St. Germ (31 page)

“You scream and run like that again and I’ll handcuff you and book you for trespassing and disturbing the peace. And you’ll
never
see your daughter again. You got it?”

I didn’t answer. The older cop walked behind us. I thought that he felt sorry for me. I hoped he did. I hoped that he’d think about me the rest of the night, for the rest of his life. But after they’d checked out my driver’s license and registration, shone a flashlight in my eyes, sat me behind the wheel with many admonitions, escorted me out of the neighborhood, I knew he wouldn’t remember anything about me past the next radio call, the next nut case, the next lost cause.

So I drove. I drove for miles and I don’t remember a single destination. I zoomed through the strange lit caverns of underpasses and through tunnels and around cloverleafs. Cars pulled up next to mine on the freeway, people gestured at me, then fell back, but I don’t know why. I think that I was talking loudly to myself, sobbing hysterically. I looked up at the lit exit signs but I could not read them. I got off the freeway and on a long dark road: miles of derricks, then the ocean at one point. A gas station. Then I was back downtown. It was the blue-grey hour before sunrise; I was in Chinatown, there were people hurrying to the street markets, there were smells of fish and coffee. I felt hungry but when I thought of eating, my stomach lurched. The sun came up in Chinatown and I parked the car and sat. I was almost out of gas.

I watched the sun swell and turn over Chinatown on its great pink axis. The car windows were rose colored. People hurried in front of my windshield—they seemed to float in their bright red pants and army jackets and genderless ponytails. Newspapers and flowers and Styrofoam cups of coffee floated by and I sat and stared. At one point a man knocked on my window, offering me an orange branch filled with whistling, bobbing, singing, wind-up birds. I shook my head no and then I thought, Ollie would like that, but he was gone and then I realized I’d forgotten for one second that Ollie was no longer with me. I put my head back on the headrest and I waited, but forgetfulness did not come again. So I got out of the car and began to walk.

I’d walked several blocks before I realized I had a coffee cup in my hand. I didn’t remember buying it or drinking it, but the cup was empty. I had somehow wandered clear of Chinatown—I looked up at the street signs and saw I was nearing Fourth and Wall.

In front of warehouses and on street corners, in alleyways, there were people huddling and sleeping on piles of rubbish. People with faces darkened and toughened by wind and exposure, rooting through garbage or panhandling. Some of them crawled in and out of cardboard boxes or packing crates. I saw a gaunt woman with pocked skin, pushing her three children ahead of her down the street. On her back a filthy hand-lettered sign read:
WE ARE HUNGRY, PLEASE HELP, THANK YOU.

I ran after her. She turned when she heard me coming up behind her, fear in her face. I saw that her left eye was blackened, and a long seamed cut like a surgical incision festered on her throat. She looked like a hatchet, something hewn from stone or shattered bone. She drew her lips back, showing her teeth like an animal, then closed them tight suddenly, pursing her lips—she did this again and again, like a mad dignitary in a receiving line: smiling, not smiling, smiling.

She stared at me and gathered her children to her, smiling, not smiling. The oldest was a little boy about seven, with an Afro, in shorts and a torn, filthy jacket. He was humming to himself.
Ollie,
I thought,
Ollie,
then stopped myself and looked at her retarded girl of five with a knee-length Ninja Turtles T-shirt on and nothing else, not even shoes, and the skinny light-skinned baby with a bubble of snot at his nose and listless black eyes.

“Whaddyou want?” Her voice was oddly gentle, soft, the harsh words dreamily stretched out. “You from the Social Service?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not from Social Services.”

I pulled a clump of bills from my bag and held it out to her. She reached out for it, then hesitated.

“You come to take my kids?”

“No.”

She took the bills, looked at them, then secreted them somewhere in her ragged coat.

I looked around. We were standing in front of a low Spanish-style building with a huge sign reading
CHRISTIAN SUPER-LIGHT MISSION
on it. A net of colored Christmas lights, many burned out, blinked off and on across its façade.

“Someone took my little girl away,” I said suddenly, and began to cry.

She nodded. She was still holding her children to her.

I wiped my tears on my sleeve, trying to change the subject. I nodded toward the mission.

“You stay here?”

She looked at me wild-eyed, her lips still moving. “You from the
mission,
is that right?” She began to edge away from me.

“I’m not. I swear it.”

She spat into the street. Her lips stopped. “They try to take my kids, like all ’em do. Take the mother in, then pack these off and send to foster. You from Social Service you said, right? You come for my kids?”

“No.”

We stared at each other.

“Where your girl?” she asked finally.

“My husband took her.”

She laughed, showing her broken teeth. “You come from the mission?”

“No.”

“You go in those missions: They
Bible-beaters
in there.”

“My husband took her—didn’t even give me a chance to talk to her. The son of a bitch, he won’t let me even see her.”

“Son of a bitch. Uh-hum. That’s right, baby.”

The baby had started crying and she lifted it on her shoulder and nuzzled it.

“I’m going to die if I don’t get her back.”

“He came after me. He’s gonna cut my babies too, he say.”

The little boy pulled away from her suddenly and tugged at her coat. His voice was high and lisping.

“Can we go up there to McDonald’s? Huh? Huh?”

“What’s going to happen now?”

She blinked.

“McDonald’s.”

We walked up the littered street toward the Golden Arches. The family stayed together, a careful unit, and I walked a little behind.

“Listen,” I called after her as we walked, “did you know that a single quark is afloat in a crowded sea of continuously appearing and disappearing virtual pairs of quarks?”

“Uh-hum. Uh-hum,” she said softly. “You from Social Service, right?”

“Quark,” said the little retarded girl, “quark quark quark!”

O
Aspasia, Annie Jump Cannon, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Elizabeth Fulhame (“the ingenious and lively Ms. Fulhame on the reduction of gold salts by light”) ... O Isabella Bird Bishop, O St. Nicerata, O Ellen Swallow, O Theana.

We marched, me bringing up the rear, toward the Golden Arches.

On the steps of the Magellan Hotel, I watched the storm clouds gather. The air was full of high-flying green electricity: Rain was on its way. The old battered men on the steps spat and complained; the wind picked up and tousled their ratty hair, blew trash across the street. Where would all these people go if it rained? Inside, I’d settled with the desk clerk (if you could call a man in a metal cage in charge of opening doors a desk clerk)—the Family would stay at the Magellan for five more days, which is what the Mother had wanted to do—and then? I didn’t know. I no longer had a salary. I had grant money for my work in the lab but I didn’t know if I was ever going back to the lab. The Mother liked the Magellan because she believed the desk kept out the Social Service and the missionaries, plus the ghost of her mother came once every two days. Also it was close to McDonald’s. Maybe in the next month or so, when my money ran out, when I slipped through the safety net into the street, I’d end up there too. With Ollie?

I’d been at the Magellan for a little while. After we’d dined at McDonald’s, the Mother had pointed out the Magellan as a refuge she’d sought when she could afford it and we went there. They settled in a “suite” of ugly brown rooms with a toilet and a sink in a closet. I sat down in a chair in a room across the hall from theirs—and I
stopped.
It was a kind of catatonia; I sat there in the chair and I don’t know how much time passed. I was aware of them moving about their room, the doors open, TV blaring ... but I was made of stone. For the moment, my headlong flight had ceased. I’d go in and out of consciousness. Sometimes I’d come to and the woman would be dancing soundlessly in my room. Once I jolted awake: she was standing over me. She touched my face—then my hair.

“Fire-red. Fire-red.” Then she frowned.

“Lemme see your
teeth.
” She pulled up my upper lip and stared at my front teeth. Her face was very close to mine, a frown of concentration on it. Her breath was sweet but overripe, like apricots.

“No
false
?”

I shook my head.

She touched my front teeth, her finger felt like a zap of electricity, then let the lip drop: “I know somebody put a
di-
mon right
there.
”

She walked away, across the hall, and took a chicken leg from a bucket on the table, then stood chewing on it, tearing at the flesh, staring across the hall at me.

When I finally shook myself and stood up, I was used to the stained walls, the bare bulb overhead; I’d lost all sense of time. Was it Wednesday, Thursday? Another week? I took a step, unsteadily—I had to go get Ollie. I washed my face, staring at myself in the rippling piece of dark mirror over the standing drain that was a sink—I saw how ghastly I looked. I rinsed my mouth and tried to clean my nails. Down the hall I could hear two drunken men shouting at each other. Then came the powerful smell of disinfectant and the clank of a pail: housekeeping.

I went downstairs and outside and stood on the steps of the Magellan Hotel in the wind and sobbed for Ollie. The numbness of her loss had splintered now into specific pains: The pain of not being able to touch her, to hold her, to nuzzle through her fragrant fine hair. The pain of not hearing her voice, of not seeing her face startle like a bird into each of its familiar and subtle expressions, not bathing her, not feeding her, not putting her to sleep. My shoulders shook and I had to sit down on the top step and hold myself, to stop the sobbing.

I had two dollars left in my pocket. I tried to remember where my car was, but I couldn’t. I wiped my eyes. I heard a ruckus behind me in the hotel lobby, turned around and saw the Family making its way through the dim stained interior. The Mother was shouting something and the kids, pulled along in her wake, looked exhausted and resigned.

They brushed past me on the top step and I touched the Mother’s arm. She looked strangely at me. She didn’t remember me though I’d just said good-bye to her upstairs. I’d asked her name and the names of her children, but she said they didn’t call each other by name and she certainly didn’t ask mine.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“We got to go,” she said and rolled her eyes. “They let in some Social Service person up there.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Wait a minute,
you
Social Service too!”

“No, I’m not. Wait, there’s no Social Service person upstairs!”

“I gotta go now.”

“Wait,” I said. “Come back here, please. Just promise me you’ll come back and stay, OK? It’s going to
rain.
”

I grabbed her sleeve; she was already on her way, the baby asleep on her shoulder.

“Don’t go, please.”

She pulled away; the baby opened its eyes and stared dully at me over her shoulder. I took the hand of the little boy. He looked at me, terrified.

“Bring your mommy back here later, to the room. It’s all paid for.”

He continued to stare at me. His mother called him and he ran. She called him Brother.

Halfway down the block, she stopped, turned around and looked directly at me.

“When my mamma
call
to me, I’ll come back here! It might be sooner, it might be
later
,” she yelled at me. “You think you can tell nobody what to do? No you
can’t,
you burnin’ Red, you can’t tell
nobody
!” Then she whirled around and shuffled off.

One of the old men on the step craned around and looked up at me. “Goddam fucking bitch,” he said. Then: “Goddam fucking wind.” And as he spoke I felt the first drizzling drops on my face. I walked past him down the steps; he held out his grizzled hand and I gave him a dollar. Then it started to pour.

I boarded the bus a few blocks away and fell exhausted into a seat. The other passengers stared at me. I was soaking wet and I was still wearing a paper crown from McDonald’s on my head and I realized I’d been talking to myself. I waved at the staring faces and they quickly looked away. Somehow this made me laugh, rather loudly, and the woman sitting across from me moved to a different seat, nearer the driver.

I stared out the window at the passing city; after a while I understood that the bus was going to go within blocks of UGC. At the main gate stop, I got off in the driving rain and walked past the guard in his neon slicker, busy in his booth, then trudged toward Oberman Hall. My shoes were filled with water and my hair was streaming. Soaking bits of the yellow tissue crown stuck to my hair and eyelashes. I stopped at one point and leaned against a tree. Then the rain came down even harder; I had to squint to see. At last I could make out the outlines of the science and research buildings and I heard myself sobbing as I pushed my body toward the lab.

I fell against the wall inside Oberman Hall, panting. When I pushed open the door, the lights were on and there was loud music. Rocky was there, dressed up in glittery leggings and a jeweled black leather jacket, lots of makeup with about sixteen gold earrings. There was her big red book bag on the floor, half filled with texts and slides.

She came around a pillar, leaned against it, and stared at me. Then she hurried over and took my arm.

“He took Ollie.”

“Who did? Jay?”

I nodded and started to sob and then I got control. I put my head back and breathed through my nose. Rocky pulled up a chair, sat me in it, then held up a hand for me to wait and turned off her tape deck.