The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (17 page)

But that was not an issue here: the boy seemed as innocent as a sprite, like a spirit of the forest that had escaped to the city and gotten lost. Is that why he asked about bread, she wondered? Was he hungry?

“Here,” she said, keeping her voice down, and then reached over the rope and handed him one and then two of the little raisin buns—let the yuppies buy something bigger.

Without looking again at him, she turned away with her bag of
miche
and started back to the stand. Behind her, she heard over car horns, sirens, and boring cell phone conversations, his small voice saying, “Thanks,” with a surprise that convinced her he had not been angling for it but had only asked her something to be friendly, or maybe to make his own morning less monotonous, or maybe even because he thought she looked miserable and wanted to help. All of these possibilities—but especially the last one—made Allie turn around suddenly and less subtly than she’d wished to smile at him or do something, she wasn’t sure what. But the boy was gone, his place taken by the traffic of which he had been so unafraid.

Allie returned to the stand where Dan was, and where he was impatiently wondering why she’d been gone so long. Apparently, it was the height of over-consumption and time-wasting hour; after nine, they’d merely be selling food to people who were hungry.

“I got lost,” Allie said, aware she was being slightly too snotty, but it was too late.

As the day wore on, and she waited on more jaded or entitled people, she thought that seeing and feeding the boy by the truck would be the highlight of the day; everyone else had much uglier motives than he. She found herself checking out the crowd, craning for any sight of him, but soon felt it was silly: he didn’t seem to have the same empty purpose or worthless destination that might make him one of them. His ambling was honourable, like sidling by a stream or sauntering down a dirt road, inviting adventure in its natural state; it was not his fault that he had wandered onto an artificial world.

It was a world where, for instance, there was no shade. More fat gobs of sweat dripped down her back to her waist, making the other side of her shirt sheer as well. Allie thought she heard a sizzling sound behind her; with a smirk, she supposed that something had been set ablaze by the sun, or was merely manifesting the burning hatred she was sending out. Then, slowly, she realized it was static from a transistor radio: Dan had been a few hours without upsetting updates, and that had been too long.

“Uh-oh,” she heard him say, holding the radio close to his head. “Oh, no.”

Allie was even more curious than annoyed, so she bent a little backwards to pick up what now worried him.

“Alert” was all she heard, because the radio was practically covered by Dan’s hair. “Credible threat” and “subway.”

For a second, sneering, Allie shook it off. How weird was Dan, cruising through stations until he found something to upset him—which he could then, what, disarm with his anxiety? What a nerd he was. But then she saw him spin the station again and then again, and each time the information was the same.

“Trusted source . . . Below ground . . . Possible bombs. . . .”

Now the fact that every voice said the same thing seemed more disturbing than tedious; it was a bulletin, their obligation to report, a repetition for everyone’s own good. Allie slowly felt the awful heat around her head replaced by a kind of cold, as if someone had rubbed an ice cube on her, the way her mother would in the summer when she was small. She missed her mother terribly now, and her father, too. Ninety miles north seemed the space from where she stood to a star in the sky. It would take her a thousand years to get home, and a different species would have evolved there by the time she arrived. She was trapped.

When Allie looked at the faces flying or trudging past, she couldn’t help but add another element to their expressions: an awareness in their eyes that something awful was around them, a threat that loomed above like a giant bird from a bad horror movie, its massive wings spreading and obscuring the sun. (It was just a coincidence, but a convenient one, that a cloud—the first of the day—had just passed over.) She refused to feel compassion for them; indeed her contempt grew—or did it drop?—to a new degree. What did you expect, living here? Don’t come crying to me! In other words, she placed her own panic and her hatred of it in herself on them.

She soon realized that the imagery wasn’t exact: the threat—credible, corroborated, or whatever the hell they said—was from below, not above, in the subway, or would be once the bad people completed their plotting and gave the signal to begin. So it was more like a giant burrowing worm was underneath them all, another idea from an awful movie that soon would suck them under and obliterate them—and they would have gone down not by accident but of their own accord, entered by a simple staircase, even paid for the privilege of being killed.

She thought it only added to the anxiety they all must feel every day, entering the tunnels of a transportation system Allie would never in a million years want to take. Just thinking of the subway made her start to sweat more, and it wasn’t the sun—it was no longer that strong. The idea of being crammed next to all those people, nose to nose, nose to neck, zooming into oblivion, was bad enough on a normal day: now it seemed inconceivable.

Slowly, she started to see the people passing without pigment, as pale as ghosts—like zombies, that was it, their skin sallow, their eyes scooped out, their steps scary because they were so slow, dogged, and steady. Allie felt faint, or what she imagined was faintness because it was the first time she’d felt it, and she nearly fell into one of the cheap foldout chairs Dan had set by the stand.

She thought she passed out for a while but she didn’t; she just sat there with her eyes closed for a minute. When she opened them again, the crowd pushing past was bigger than before and going the other way: it was the evening journey home from work. This was the second “big sales” period; there were two more hours before they could leave. Allie glanced at Dan, but he was counting change for customers, the radio now barely audible. There would be no fleeing early while he could still earn.

Everyone was doomed, and Allie realized that she wasn’t angry anymore: for the first time, she could admit it, she was afraid. But since she had to be angry with someone, she decided to denounce those who would judge and condemn her fear. Well, how else was she supposed to feel? What were they, crazy? This allowed her to cross over to this new emotion, as if using a rock in a river as her bridge to another bank.

When Allie focused on the crowd of the condemned again, to her surprise she recognized a face.

She was sure that the boy from before was standing across the square. Was she imagining it or was he smiling at her and even coming closer? If she waved at him, would she be making a mortifying mistake and have to turn her wave into a hair comb, like a comic she’d seen on TV?

She wasn’t wrong: immediately, as if moving on an imaginary escalator, the boy was at her booth, standing right before her; they were no longer separated by a bungee cord or whatever wrapped around the fair. Each was on the inside now, and Allie felt safer just seeing him.

“So,” he said, “how’s business?”

Allie couldn’t answer: she had no idea. It seemed fine, busy, lots of bread had been sold, so she only shrugged and saw it was the right reply—he didn’t care, either, was just making conversation, needed an excuse to come back, and that made her smile at him with her biggest and maybe only real smile of the day.

“I’m Sonny,” he said. Sorry? Ari? What had he said? It was obviously his name and she hadn’t heard it, and within a second it would be too late to ask again, and then she never could—and there it was, it was too late, she’d never know.

Resigned to it, she said, “I’m Allie,” and at least the name she imagined he had sounded a little like hers, so that was something.

“You, do you work here or—”

“I come from a little upstate.” A little upstate? What did that mean? She couldn’t even speak English, how appealing was that?

“Look, uh—you going back right away, or—”

Was she? She had no idea, was not in control of her life. She turned to check with Dan, and he was at once selling a chocolate croissant to a lady too fat to be buying one and speaking on a cell phone crushed ridiculously between his shoulder and his tilted head—probably to his wife, who had grey hair Allie thought was way too long for her age.

When she turned back, she was aware that the boy could have seen again through her soaked shirt, her bra straps through the crude track team stick figures—she was completely exposed to him everywhere, and her mom’s sweater had long since fallen to the ground—but again his eyes were on hers and seemed never to have moved.

“I don’t know,” she said, and thought she sounded stupid, without a thought in her head—his worse image of someone from “a little upstate.”

“Well, maybe I could show you around. We could take a walk or something—see the city—I mean, if you feel like it.”

There was something in the way he said it—it went beyond his tentative quality, which was courteous, by the way, not clueless—that didn’t mean mere tourism; he was offering himself up as a companion in an unstable world currently under siege. At least that’s how she heard his idea, as a form of—not presumptuous or pushy but protective—partnership. If he’d intuited earlier that she was unhappy, now he knew that she was nervous; he was her link to something essential and real, not tricked-up like the city she believed they both were lost in. This made her agree to go and made Dan immediately a minor detail she could handle without really caring how.

“Let me just deal with this,” she said.

Dan was now off the phone and customer-free, so unfortunately he had a clear head with which to hear Allie’s request and in which to find a new cause for concern.

“But we’re going back soon,” he said, and then added something about Allie’s parents, which this time she didn’t let sway her, as if she were ignoring an insult, and then he even mentioned the “alert,” which Allie couldn’t say but sensed that she alone would now be safe from. Assuring him that she would soon return and knew his cell phone number—actually, just yelling this back to him as she ran away—Allie was gone, the boy behind and then right beside her, Sonny, or Ari, or whoever he was.

Enormously relieved, Allie found herself jabbering on to him—about her family, the whole college thing, her job, Dan, the city, the country, what she wanted from life—an explosion of honesty that was a working definition of trust, at least for her who was wary of almost everyone. The boy said nothing yet still seemed to hear—a plus given how other boys just listened long enough to learn when you’d stop and let them start talking—and the crowds, no longer of zombies or horror movie victims but merely hot and harried people, seemed to part for them and let them pass.

Allie was talking so much that she didn’t notice where they were headed: across the pavement space of Union Square that led to, among other places, a park, a set of stores, and the wide thoroughfare of 14
th
Street.

None of them were where—with a brief but definitive touch of her arm—the boy signalled her to stop. When Allie looked up, people were no longer coming directly at them like rain on your windshield in a thunderstorm but were safely off to either side. She saw what they had reached: the entrance to the subway, the 4, 5, 6, N and R.

“What do you mean?” she asked as if he had said something instead of simply stopping, and then she even smiled a little at the absurdity of what she saw.

“What’s the problem?” he said. “Haven’t you ever been on it?”

“No,” she said, “of course not.” And how had he if he was just as innocent as she?

“Well, this is the day to do it,” he said. “With this phony alert—this is when it’ll be the most fun.”

Phony? It was as if his words were in a foreign tongue—or words you’ve repeated so many times they’re incoherent—and it took a while before Allie could turn them into words she knew. Suddenly, she understood: he was not like her, an alien visitor; he was the opposite: a native so steeped in this environment he knew its every corner, and so cynical he could distinguish a false alarm from a real emergency—and laugh about it—and then go right into the teeth of where it was supposedly least safe.

Allie instinctively felt the cell phone in the little fanny pack tied about her waist (which of course tagged her as from out of town) then turned back to see the stand where Dan was waiting. But it was lost behind New Yorkers, as if they had closed over and consumed it, an experienced army that kills with one shot an amateur naïve enough to intrude on its territory.

When she turned back, the boy was beckoning her, his face promising only pleasure—no, nothing that profound, just dumb fun, and amazed she wouldn’t take the opportunity. How many would she ever have?

It was hard for Allie to go back to anger once she’d experienced fear—she’d left it on the other shore as it were, when she’d crossed over—and it was hard to feel fear once she’d experienced trust. She was young, younger than most people her age, and so insecure that she held onto every emotion fiercely until she could find a new reason all by herself to release it. With whom would she be safer, someone as ignorant as she or someone who knew the city better than anyone else? Of course—what were you, nuts?

So she let the boy guide her gently toward and down the stairs.

Immediately, it was like hell—so many steamy people on the narrow staircase you could take only tiny steps, orderly enough going up and down on either side until someone decided to breach the boundary and cross over and then all became chaos. The boy preceded her and, in the crush, her hand slipped from his and she grabbed onto the back of his belt—a gesture more intimate than she’d intended and one that made her fingers touch for a second the bare small of his back before she could loop them on the leather again. His skin was cool and covered in a thin down of hair as dark as everything else about him—except for his eyes, which she had only now noticed were blue-green and shone as bright as an animal’s from its den when they’re the only things you see. Soon they reached the floor of the station and the last sight of any sun vanished; there was no reversing course, at least not without her clawing through that crowd again and alone, for he was obviously committed to continuing.