The Apartment: A Novel (12 page)

We all stayed another few days in New York. I had grown claustrophobic – the flags, the cops, the taxis, the increasingly self-aware symbolism of American resilience – but it was nice to see my mother and father in the same room, talking about bullshit and admiring their grandkids. One morning, my mother, my sister, her two older kids and I were in the kitchen. My sister’s husband was at work – it was a Sunday, but he always worked. It was a cloudy morning, and the leaves had changed, and the city was loud. My mother was cleaning the countertops for the tenth time that morning, and my sister asked her to sit down. My mother said, Just a minute. Sit down, said my sister. My mother was wearing an apron. She searched for something to wipe her wet hands on, then wiped them on the apron. Hold on, she said. Sit down, said my sister. You want me to go? I asked. No, said my sister. I poured myself an orange juice and leaned against the counter. Mom, said my sister, I know you’re busy at home, but I’m going back to work part-time soon, and I’d like you to move in and help with the kids. My mother pretended to address the problem of leaving, moving, responsibilities. Think about it, said my sister. The kids started screaming for her to move in. They pulled at her arms. I admired my sister. She asked no questions she did not know the answer to. She had a clear vision, not necessarily of what she wanted, but what she needed and how to get it. Her husband is a mean, greedy narcissist, with a thick New York accent and a sports car, and I’m sure he cheats on her, but when the marriage ends my sister will get everything, including the kids, and while he spirals into pathetic self-destruction she will find a way to be successful, proud of what she has accomplished, and remain a mother beloved by her children.

The day after that, my father flew back to St Croix. My sister made me promise to get him to JFK so early that he couldn’t possibly miss his flight. I drove him there and left him at the kerbside, and he said, I’ve got three and a half goddamn hours, I’m checked in already, and I have no bags to check. So I told him I’d park and come in. That morning the clouds had vanished after a week of dull weather, and it was clear – the sky was light blue and bright, and there was a touch of winter in the air. You hungry? he asked. Not really, I said. So we sat at the bar of a Mexican restaurant and he ordered a vodka on the rocks. It’s a bit early, I said. What does time mean to a guy who lives on a sailboat? he asked. Besides, how long’s it gonna be before we get another drink together? Okay, I said, and I ordered a beer. We sat at the bar and periodically looked up at the television, which was playing what the bartender told us was a Puerto Rican soap opera. I had a feeling this would be the last time I saw him. Or perhaps I knew for sure. I think I may have tried to take a picture of him in my mind, to memorize him exactly, so that I would carry the image all the way to my death, and think of him then, as a man in his late fifties, happy, drinking with his son at an airport, so that I could tell his memory goodbye. I did that with everybody in my family. But if that is what I’d tried to do with him, and with the others, I failed, because I can no longer picture them – I only see disconnected parts of them. He’s a tall man – six foot four, an inch taller than me – and shaves his head. He wears cheap baseball hats and sunglasses indoors. My mother wears large, thick glasses and has a cackle, and my sister has blue eyes, which exist as blue and hazel speckles in the brown eyes of her children.

I was living in Norfolk at that time, temporarily, after my return from reservist duty – actually in a little motel on the interstate outside Hampton. I had come back from Iraq with a little bit of money and an idea. When my mother left for New York, I moved back to the desert and prepared to return to Iraq as a private contractor, putting my business together, contacting people, selling my strategy, organizing my visa, tendering for jobs, drawing up contracts, working out my security. Every dime I had, I invested in my business, and my apartment was the tiniest shithole you could possibly imagine. It was in one of those brown-wood, two-storey blocks typical of that city, with a row of doors on the ground floor and a wobbly, uneven platform that you walk to reach the doors on the floor above it. I was on the ground floor. The light came through my green curtains in the way that daylight goes through water – underwater, you look up and see the light dappling and shimmering on the surface, but you look around and see the light is diffuse, and beyond it is a fathomless black mystery. That was what my place was like at times. I spent hardly any time there. I showered at a gym in the building where I rented my office. Across the street from my apartment was a halfway house, but except for the fact that they lived behind a high, barbed-wire fence, you could not have distinguished the inmates from anyone else in that neighbourhood. Poor blacks and poor whites, poor Latinos. Addicts. Prostitutes. Thieves. Gangbangers. Dealers. Murderers. Drunk drivers. Rapists. They just sat on benches and smoked cigarettes, and from time to time a fight broke out. I had some upstairs neighbours, a couple of very tall teenage kids who lived with their grandmother on the second level of the apartments, and they and their friends used to stand along the platform, smoke weed, and stare at them. What are you staring at? one might yell. The kids said nothing. Who knew what satisfaction they took from it? Then another inmate would start cursing, just screaming at the bench he was sitting upon. Then a few more would start screaming at my neighbours, telling them to mind their own business. Then, when my neighbours refused to relent, a hysteria swept through the inmates. One woman might start repeating, No, no, no, no,
no
,
no
,
NO
, louder and louder, longer and longer, until it became the ridiculous and unnervingly comical sound of a child refusing to eat, and then another might start weeping, and so on. This could last hours. Only when the staff could get the last man to calm down did my neighbours withdraw. Nobody ever gave me much hassle. I stayed out of everyone’s way. Perhaps they assumed, by the conservative cut of my hair, or the fact that I displayed no sign of madness or addiction, that I was a criminal of a higher class, the real fucking deal. Some Russian assassin. I worked that assumption and it may have kept me safe. Things happened in that building that would horrify the average middle-class person. I mean beatings, assaults, daylight robberies. I ignored it. I didn’t have a television or a radio, so I had to ignore it the old-fashioned way. I hummed to myself, or did push-ups. I had a girlfriend once who laughed at men who exercised to rid themselves of stress, and so I always laughed a little at myself doing those push-ups, but I was desperate. When there was nothing to do, I drank a lot of coffee. I had one of those Italian espresso makers you fill with water and put on a range, and I added cardamom to the grounds. The scent of cardamom reminded me of the coffee I drank in the Middle East, in Qatar, in Iraq, and my last hour there after my work on the FDE, in Queen Alia International, by myself, a sand-bound sailor on his way home, at the Four Seasons lounge, staring out the window toward the invisible city of Amman, which was buried in haze. I would travel right back through that lounge on my way to Baghdad as a civilian contractor. I must have gone through ten cups of coffee a day. Maybe that’s what the average American drinks. Usually I was in the office from five a.m. to midnight. My apartment was just a few blocks from the football stadium, so near that on Sundays the roar of the crowd seemed like a great godlike breath trying to blow us over. I had not specifically sought a place by the stadium, but I liked living there, because it fed my hatred of the kingdom of ambitious stupidity, of the loud and gruesome happenstance of American domination. I hated that noise, and that stadium, and I hated everyone in it, and I sat for long periods of time on a couch I’d bought for nothing at a flea market, listening to the celestial ecstasy of the dumb luck of being born American. That collective whoop. I hated that country and every man and woman and child and bug alive in it. I had no idea what I wanted in life then, but I knew that I hated America, and I wished that it or I did not exist. And while I thought this, on Sundays, the stadium responded with great, ecstatic, dumb breaths. And when I went to my office, I dressed in a decent suit and put an American flag on the lapel.

About a month before I returned to Iraq, I got an email from Josephina’s mother. It was one of those emails that say, I don’t know if this address works, or if this is who I think it is, but I am so-and-so, and I know you from such-and-such, and I’ve been looking for you. I found you on the internet. I was sitting in my office downtown, twenty-two storeys up in a twenty-five storey building. It was around midnight. I had a nice view of the western half of the city, twinkling green and yellow and orange and red and blue and violet. The interstates made long white loops that carved the city into pieces. But for a moment, and I was never able to regain the sensation in a meaningful way, I realized the overwhelming blackness of the view. The sensation of suddenly noticing not only that the scene was more dark than light and more still than twinkling, but also that the darkness was far more intense than the lights, was like closing your eyes and opening them to discover that anything beyond what you perceive is attainable only in death. Beyond the outermost suburbs, where the black was most intense, the horizon rose into jagged, black, invisible mountains. There wasn’t anything above it. Maybe one or two stars, maybe a planet. It had been a long, long time since I’d thought about Josephina, and when I remembered her letter I immediately remembered that I’d written back to her. I’d forgotten this for a long time. I cannot recall much of what I wrote to Josephina, and it may be that I was not supposed to write back, that I crushed the sentiment of her farewell in the same way you crush the farewell of a person who says goodbye to you on a street by continuing to walk with them. I believe I told her something like: I will pursue a destiny of justice and righteousness in your memory. I mailed my letter and became an ensign.

I telephoned Estelle immediately upon receiving her email, and the next day I drove south to meet her. It was my first trip home since I’d left. The drive takes about three hours. The landscape changes gradually from sand and dirt and rock and cacti and brush to sun-bleached grass fields, deciduous trees, milkweed, blue palmettos, and little flowers like rock lettuce and dandelions. You take the interstate south for a while, but you have to turn onto a small state highway that doesn’t get much traffic. The day was warm and sunny, and incredibly bright. I really hated the place as a kid, and I had gone on hating it my whole life. In some ways I even recognized that what I really hated about America was the fact that I hated everything in proximity to this particular place, and the further away I got, the less hatred I felt. It was like some kind of epicentre, but there was no event, no tragedy, no cause. I was born to hate the place I came from. That day, however, I fought a curious and unexpected nostalgia as I approached. I was thinking of what I’d say to Josephina when I got there, and I had to tell myself that it was not Josephina I would be seeing, it was Estelle. I listened to the radio. Mexican music. Norteña music. I stopped at a roadside stand and bought some dried chilli peppers, not because I needed them, but because I wanted to get out of the car on the side of the road and stand in the sun.

I arrived around eleven. The town was as I’d left it. You hit a patch of houses built close to the road, many of them derelict – they were derelict when I lived there too. There’s a gas station. Then you hit some tracks, over which the old downtown stands, where there is nothing but empty offices, empty rusted mills, empty rusted warehouses, and a tall, rusted water tank with the name of the town on it. The task of renovating the old town was too formidable, so they just left it to rust to death. Beyond it, there is an amorphous collection of houses down lonely, woody roads, then you come to a large highway, and past that a series of strip malls appears, and suburbs that drift back behind them. Josephina’s house was not far from mine. I decided to speak with Estelle before I drove by my house. Estelle had not explained why, after all these years, she had suddenly looked me up, and until that mystery was solved I’d be too distracted to appreciate anything else. Nobody would be at my house. My mother hadn’t got a decent offer on it before moving to New York, so she hadn’t sold it. I didn’t have a key. I just wanted to stand outside it for a little while, or walk around the front and back yards.

I pulled up at Estelle’s and turned the engine off. At that time I was driving an old metallic-green hatchback Toyota – a car that was as beat-up and modest as my little apartment by the stadium. The house was a red brick ranch-style bungalow with a two-car detached garage with an apartment on top of it, and a long but shallow screened-in porch. I do not remember the first day I ever met Josephina, but a photograph taken that day by my mother, in which Josephina and I are standing by bicycles outside that porch, hung on a wall full of pictures in our dining room. She had a green bike with a banana seat, and I had a black dirt bike. I watched the windows, on either side of the porch, for motion. It was a funny place to be, a funny thing to be doing. I pulled the keys out of the ignition, got out and walked to the front door. I rang the bell and waited. There was noise, some footsteps, then the door was unlocked, then it opened. There was Estelle, short, a little overweight, with short white hair, wearing a red shirt and tan slacks. She shook my hand with both her hands, and she said it was wonderful and strange to see me again. I was so tall, so handsome. Come in, she said. We sat down in her kitchen, at a small round wooden table with flowers in the centre and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of a rooster and a hen. It was only when I noticed these that I realized I was sitting in a shrine to farm animals. Ceramic figurines, from the thimble-sized to the whiskey-bottle-sized, crowded shelves on the walls, bookshelves, and filled display cases. Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, chickens. The centrepiece was a large collection of photographs of Josephina as a child and teenager, which I did not linger upon.