The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (19 page)

Afterwards, he considerately cleaned her off with a Kleenex then kissed her gently from her neck to her knees before she saw his pretty face again.

She slept for an unknown amount of time, anywhere from two minutes to twenty-four hours. When she woke up, not knowing where she was, she saw the boy too close to be in focus, stretched alongside her, staring right into her eyes and smiling, like a child waiting for a parent to get up.

They took a shower together, and they would have started up again—there was something about his being so wet and scrawny except for, well, you know where, and ready to go again; he
was
like the New York City subway, available at any hour—but through the tiny bathroom window, she saw that the sun had set, and she realized what time it must be and what trouble she was in.

Allie was surprised how different the kinds of disobedience could make her feel. This kind immediately eliminated any interest she had in more lovemaking and made dread an almost physical feeling, a form of nausea.

She quickly put her clammy clothes back on, which were soaked by shower water she had hardly wiped away, and her hair was so wet it dripped even more on her shirt and skirt and onto the floor, where it made an amazingly big puddle for someone with such a small head. It was helpful to concentrate on that and not on the dialling of Dan’s cell phone on Tony’s home phone, which was just about to end—oh, why weren’t there more (a never-ending amount of) numbers to it?

To her relief, Dan was more frantic than furious, and his cell phone had such bad reception she only caught every other excoriation. His main points, however, were clear: he had trusted her and she had betrayed him, he hated but would have to tell her parents, this was no day to be running around wild in the city, he didn’t know who this boy was anyway, and they had to leave now—not in half an hour but now.

Allie noticed that Dan could give full flower to his fears now that the day was over and there could be no more selling of
miche
. Nonetheless, she would have been mortified by his admonishments if Tony had not been standing beside her in his underwear, dripping wet as well, making screamingly funny faces to mock what he was sure Dan was saying. When he put his hands on his narrow hips and strutted around like a stupid idiot, then moved his lips as if Dan were a pissed-off pigeon or something, Allie had to lightly bite her cheeks not to laugh. She said, “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

When Tony heard that, he got strangely serious. He pulled over a piece of old newspaper, then swiftly scribbled on its side margin and raised it for her to read: “Take the train. I want to see you off.”

The certainty of the words impressed Allie, more than Dan was impressing her—after all, what had
h
e done for her today? Tony knew where it all stood in the city—the truth about the threat. He was the wisest person she had ever met, and she felt closer to him than to anyone in the world. Egged on by Tony nodding over and over, pointing to his pencilled message—not aware
he
looked kind of funny now, because
he
was the one so serious—Allie obediently blurted out, “I’ll take the train,” then pressed the button and deserted Dan, a gesture nowhere near as satisfying as slamming down the phone but the best she could do and actually not so bad.

They took the subway back downtown. By now, there were only a few passengers scattered through the cars, those who chose not those who needed. The tension—the terror—of commuting during a catastrophe had eased, and the people who remained were either resigned or indifferent to it, and too few for it to be fun or feasible to fool around in their midst. Besides, the urge had passed.

When they reached Penn Station, it seemed massive and clogged but not in a good way. Allie felt small and lost in its frankly grubby expanse—so many people were pushing valises on wheels with the sad faces of those travelling to funerals of friends—and she held onto Tony’s arm tightly now, not wanting him to drift away an inch.

She noticed that he seemed impatient, glancing around, as if anticipating something. “All’s clear here,” he said, and sounded disappointed.

Then the two of them stopped, because they were forced to.

Three policemen in the near-distance were waving at them and everyone else. Not wasting time with courtesy, they yelled to “Go back” and “Get out.” Soon other officers of all sizes and both sexes were crudely herding then virtually pushing them back the way they came.

Dozens of them were deposited outside, many obviously late for trips they had planned much longer than Allie had her own. Those who joined them were offended, annoyed, or—quietly but it was clear—made uneasy by having this happen. Allie heard someone say, “They found something,” and someone else, “A suitcase,” and finally, in a New York-accented voice trying hard to sound more inconvenienced than afraid, “Jesus Cwist.” Then there was the approaching sound of sirens and car after car after car of cops pulled up.

When Allie looked to Tony for an explanation, she saw he was smirking in his by now signature style.

“Idiots,” he said with certainty. “All of them.”

Allie was comforted by his typical tone of voice, which seemed to restore and bring about calm. Yet she couldn’t help recalling that he had said he’d see her off, yet had never mentioned seeing her again. And that he breathed a bit easier—and spoke with satisfied bitterness—now that the cops had found a bag.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “A fake. And they fell for it. They always will.”

He lit a cigarette, something she had never seen him do, and exhaled smoke with indifference into the surrounding crowd. He appeared to enjoy the discomfort it caused and replied with a smiling obscenity when someone asked him to stop.

Allie couldn’t help it, she saw more images from awful movies: Tony dissolving into a wolf or whatever villain the actor really was. Was there not a second he could be serious about such a thing? Was that how deep his disgust with the world went? And what did that say about how he felt about her? She was afraid to ask.

Slowly, she felt an alteration in herself as well. She felt her judgment of others returning: from fear of being tossed away by him, she was morphing like people in movies, too, back into a moralist.

“Well,” she said. “I think it’s awful.”

“What?”

“That someone would do such a thing. Plant a bag.”

They certainly would never have done it back home—a phony phone call was the worst kind of prank they pulled.

“Don’t get on your high horse,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“You’re going to buy into this now?”

“Well, why not? What would officials get out of faking it?”

“Lots of things. Keeping us controlled. Making us behave. And what do you mean, ‘get out of it’? It’s not like you did so badly by it.”

The remark shook Allie like seeing a death notice in a newspaper of someone she knew. She imagined ringing in her ears like a kind of cash register, the daily exchange of services that went on where they were—that you would always hear as long as the city existed, no matter how many silent computers took their place to do the tally: the way of a world in which people lived too close to do anything decent with each other. Even in this new era—even if it was the end of the world—there were opportunities to make a deal, and she’d been smack in the middle of one and was mortified by it.

“Please get away from me,” she said.

Allie fought through the new crowd—after those that had been so secret and stimulating, this one felt fit to suffocate her. Her need to escape was greater than the crowd’s to gather and so soon she was free of it and him, the boy she hated now because she was vulnerable and he had made her ashamed.

“Help me, help me,” she said to a female cop whom she crashed into and who—not very kindly—told her to please clear the area.

Allie hid a few blocks away in a chain coffee store, one not yet transplanted to her town. She checked out the window with false casualness, but she never saw Tony approaching. Did she want him to pursue her? Definitely not, which meant yes, though Allie was so rattled it was hard to imagine what he could have said to mollify her, and besides, he didn’t come or couldn’t find her.

Soon some of the people chased from the station had drifted as far as she had fled and were standing outside and smoking, philosophically. A few even joined her in the shop, shaking their heads at the modern world, and that’s how she heard that the station was open again, the emergency was over, and the bag had been a bad joke.

She walked back in the dark, asking strangers for directions when she only had to retrace her stops, not wanting to know, to be at ease any longer in this environment. When she reached the station, she saw no one she recognized—he was not there waiting, in other words. She paced outside, ostensibly to catch her breath but really to see if he’d show up; she was soon shooed inside by overeager cab drivers who could tell she was a tourist (the fanny pack was just the beginning) and wished to take her anywhere on Earth for way too much.

On the escalator going down and in, Allie called Dan’s cell and told him she was on her way, her parents shouldn’t worry, let him break it to them that she’d be late. Maybe—she thought with hope that was really fear that was really disillusionment—they might not mind so very much.

Dan was still on the road, alone in his truck without even bread along for the ride, and was relieved and conciliatory. He told her what train to take, something she could have learned for herself if she hadn’t again made herself helpless.

After she boarded, Allie watched out the window to see if Tony would come running in, last-minute, like someone from another movie—a romantic one this time—and maybe he’d get stuck on the train because he’d taken so long to say he loved her, and he’d have to actually go upstate with her, and that would be the end. But he didn’t come, or had gone to the wrong car.

The train pulled out—it was a commuter model, with cushioned seats unlike the subway and still sort of crowded, for there’d been back-ups due to the disruptive bag. Allie stared at the receding platform and thought about the boy. She cried in great choking, child-like sobs, hoping the humiliating sound would be smothered by the train’s exhaust. Then she dried her face on her bare forearms, for she had no tissue or even sleeves.

By going to her home, the train seemed to be taking her back in time. Yet—like everything else on Earth—Allie was actually going forward. Slowly, she felt even angrier now than before she’d come, more prone to punish, and this was a mere glimpse of how she’d be later in her life.

On her cell phone, she dialled 911 and spoke loudly enough to be heard by the operator but low enough not to disturb her seatmate, a man dozing fitfully. She didn’t know the boy’s last name or actual address, but she knew his first name and the number on his family’s phone, and she thought someone could use the information.

“He was dark, probably foreign. Maybe he had something to do with planting that bag.”

Even though he was innocent, he might be taught a lesson and given a good talking to. She didn’t say her own name and hung up when they asked.

Then the train went into a new tunnel, one so dark she could no longer see herself. And in it, she fell asleep.

The alert, in which the boy had not believed, was about to become very real for him. For Allie, it would quickly become an edited, censored, self-aggrandizing anecdote she repeated to her family and friends back in town. And, inevitably, it would fade like a flower, until it was a memory as distant, foggy, and half-forgotten as a dream.

Was it the beating of his heart? Maybe it was nothing at all, this thumping he heard around him. Or maybe it was something approaching on big fat footsteps. Or something that just
announced
an approach: a drumbeat, a fanfare, a—what was the word?—a herald.

Whatever it was, he could not deny the sound in the empty apartment. There was no furniture left to absorb the sound, no lights for him to identify anything making a sound, and, since he sat on the floor of the ground floor apartment and knew it wasn’t beneath him, its source remained a mystery.

Shivering, Selwyn pulled the blanket around him. Sometimes, beyond his bloody face, he could see his breath and, fascinated by it, he said a few words to watch the little cold clouds form.

“Now I know,” he said, the “N” sounds particularly good at propelling the, what was it, condensed air? Steam? That didn’t sound right; he was so ignorant about everything.

He didn’t know why he didn’t just get up and go: everything had already happened, and he had to be out by morning, six hours away. But in truth he felt as if he was awaiting something now, and the sound—which, as he’d already thought, was premonitory—seemed to bear him out.

“Now I know.” He’d said it automatically, but he’d obviously meant it somehow, so he had to wait, also, in a sense, to catch up with his unconscious, to learn the origin of why he’d uttered it. Besides, there was no easy way to stand, nothing left to hold onto—another unconscious allusion to his present circumstances—no chair or anything to hoist himself up, so he stayed where he was.

Selwyn’s teeth started chattering as in a cartoon. It was colder in the country: a banal observation, he knew, but one he had never stopped thinking—or saying, when he still had people to talk to—and now he thought it again. He had thought it the day he showed up from the city, fleeing after
it
happened—and here he wasn’t being coy, just so hated considering the actual event by name; that’s how sensitive, high-strung, thin-skinned, call it what you will, he was about it—and the country had only gotten colder, in all ways, since then.

“You want to copy the whole thing?” Ray the computer man had asked the day before he fled—“whole thing” meaning whole hard drive—and Selwyn had agreed. What was he leaving anyway, besides the possibility of imminent violent death along with everyone else in Manhattan? What had he ever accomplished there, in a place where “accomplishment” meant only one thing (making money) and “where everyone is big-time,” in the words of his father, who hadn’t been born there as Selwyn had, who had come there seeking this very kind of accomplishment, was challenged by it—unlike Selwyn, who had only been intimidated by it—and who had actually become a famous novelist well before Selwyn’s current age of forty, and who would have surely considered leaving the city like this the worst kind of cowardice, public violent cataclysm or no, and who had only himself “left” two years ago at the late age of eighty, unwillingly and brutally escorted by the bouncer leukaemia.So why not just put his whole hard drive onto a zip, the very name connoting speed and a cocky, comical—what was the word for when you washed your hands of everything?

“Okay, here’s how you do it then,” Ray the computer man had said, and explained right there in the store for free. That’s how nice everyone was being in the first few days after
it
.

Why not just copy his bank records, personal letters, unsuccessful attempts at every career from journalism to academia, put them in his back pants pocket and fly as far as fear would take him?

It turned out to be about ninety miles north. Even now Selwyn could see the black and hunchbacked mountains through the curtains he had kept (paid for and so not had repossessed) and only partly closed, the skiing area that gave the place its history, glamour, and cachet.

None of those fancy digs had been for him, however, no house—of course, he could only afford to rent an apartment much like the one he had just abandoned in the city, though smaller and cheaper and located not in a pre-war high-rise but in a little development of eight shabby mock-houses, “Gleeful Terrace,” on the first floor of three and one of six other flats. His bomb shelter.

Most of his neighbours were elderly and seemed both glad and confused to see such a healthy (though pale) single man in early middle-age (with no car) in their midst. Had he moved up there for a job, his aged upstairs neighbour wanted to know?

“Uh, yes,” Selwyn said, even though he had just up and quit his job proofreading the backs of cereal boxes, a gig that hardly paid at all, and he was living only on a small inheritance from his father.

Actually, Selwyn couldn’t say why he had come—panic—because in the country no one actually understood how bad it had been in the city, and those who suspected refused to accept it. Here things seemed to have stayed the same for centuries, regardless of the trends and changes “down there”: the disaster to them was like when they first installed that subway or those electric traffic lights down there, a distant, modern event, the ripples of which would eventually reach them, but not now, not yet, wait a few years, why don’t you? Also, everybody there acted so laconic and countrified and self-sufficient-like that to give off even a trace of his actual trauma was to appear horribly, hopelessly weak, and what kind of a way was that to move in?

“Uh, yes, I’ll be working here,” he said again, to the excruciatingly cute and dangerously young college student/waitress at Hilly’s, the town diner, who seemed oddly attentive to him. Since he’d never received any kind of attention from similarly cute and young acting student/waitresses in the city, he assumed it was his very newness and maybe even his age that made him exotic and of interest. Still, as he always had at home, he mumbled so quietly that he had to repeat himself several times to be heard.

“Yes, I’ll be working here. I said, I’ll be
working here
.” And finally, lying very loudly, “WORKING HERE.”

Still, it was safer not to engage her, and safety was, after all, what he had come there to find. It was safer, too, not to actually
ask
the owner of the local bookstore, Left Brain, if he had a job for him instead of just assuming, from the relative emptiness of the place in the two and a half hours he spent browsing in it, that he couldn’t possibly need another hand. (It was the only local place he could even conceive of working, since his other jobs, such as they had been, revolved around correcting other people’s writing—most recently “The Story of Spelt,” on the back of the Succor Flakes box, which had had only one grammatical error anyway, which he considered too unimportant to even dare mentioning.)

In his new home, he was no more assertive. The heat was faulty, the toilet kept running for forty minutes after being flushed, there were nails sticking up at the entrance to one closet after a carpet had been removed and not replaced, and a paint job of the kitchen had never been completed. His super assured him that these chores would get done soon, but Selwyn didn’t press, said in fact, “No rush,” even though the bottom of his left foot was covered in band-aids after he had first entered the closet barefoot. And so the super, a tall, skinny, bearded man named Tim who could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old, believed him and did nothing. Similarly, his aged upstairs neighbour, apparently still nimble enough to move his fingers up, down, and across, often practiced a mournful cello until well into the wee hours, but Selwyn let that go, too, apart from a few timid taps on the man’s door that might have been answered if they’d only been heard.

Most days and nights he just spent sitting alone in the apartment, which he had begun to furnish with nice pieces bought on credit—why punish himself further by looking at unpleasantness all day? Hadn’t life been unpleasant enough recently?—and marvelling at how absolutely silent it was at night outside cities. On New Year’s Eve, for instance, which had been deafening until dawn in his old digs, and which he now spent in the same solitary idleness as every other night, he counted only one dim, distant, drunken cry of “Whee!” outside, which on closer consideration, could have been a coyote being hit by a car.

Now, as he sat waiting and shaking in the dark, covered in blood, there were no such sounds from outside—or upstairs, either, the cello man having died weeks before and his apartment yet to be rented. Besides, he would never have mistaken the thumping or whatever it was for the old man’s music, even for the occasional merry slapping of the cello he did when his sad song would suddenly for a strange second shift into a jazzy little tune before sliding back to sadness again.

Selwyn, of course, could not forget the last time he had heard the music. It had been on the night, a few feet away from where he now sat, he had first gone into his new laptop to retrieve the copy of his hard drive that Ray the computer man had helped him create. He had intended to use funds left to him by his father to pay his first month’s rent.

The file was empty.

At first he thought there was some sort of mistake. The title of the file was there, so was the little cartoon image of the file—and that’s as far as he could go in describing it, “little cartoon image”—but, inside, where all the information about his finances had been, there was nothing.

For several minutes Selwyn could do no more than pace and clap his hands, impotent and infuriated. Where
was
the file? And again, his knowledge of how and where things were actually “located” on computers went no further than the word “where.” Then he decided to check the copies of all the other files to make sure they at least had been made.

His personal letters, some sent in response to receiving condolences on each of his parents’ deaths, others apologizing to women he’d dated who thought him too mild or too “nice,” his applications for employment, unanswered or rejected, his abandoned short story, novel, play, screenplay, sitcom pilot, piece of “creative” nonfiction, and poem—all
appeared
to be present, for all retained their little cartoon images and titles (“Jennylett,” “Alicelett,” “Untitledshorstor”), but like a contaminated neighbourhood where the names and addresses remain outside of houses with no one left within, all were empty, too.

His face and chest became hot from disoriented fear. Selwyn made the first call he had made to the city since fleeing.

“Uh-oh,” Ray the computer the man said. “Oh, no. Whoops.”

“What do you mean, ‘whoops’?” Selwyn asked him, feeling dizzy and sinking into a canvas chair he had just charged.

“Well, it’s like this—” and Ray went on to remind Selwyn about the “shortcut” he had placed on Selwyn’s desktop, because Selwyn hadn’t wanted to move each and every one of his files onto the zip; it would take too much time. This had been a way—remember?—to copy only one big document onto the zip as opposed to lots of little ones. Once Selwyn had moved all the little ones into the shortcut, that is.

“You did put all your files in there, right?” he asked.

Selwyn didn’t immediately answer. He had just assumed—idiotically, it turned out—that all the documents had been
in
the shortcut already, that Ray had put them there. Or something. In other words, he had done nothing of the sort and soon had to say so.

“Uh-oh,” Ray said again, very quietly this time. “You just saved the shortcut then.”

Tears began to come to Selwyn’s frightened eyes. “Yes,” he confessed, hardly knowing what the hell he was even saying. “I just saved the shortcut.”

The path, the method, the way of solving something had been saved; the thing that needed solving had been lost—or, more precisely, left on and chucked out with the computer Selwyn had dumped outside in the trash with all his other stuff on the day before he fled.

“Well, look,” Ray said, “that’s not
my
fault.”

Ray, who had been so generous just days after
it
occurred, was now, just a few weeks later, no longer so generous. Had he and everyone else in the city already returned to their old ways? Had so much bloodshed right before their eyes already been absorbed, accepted, and forgotten? Suddenly, Selwyn felt cut off, abandoned, permanently out of reach.

He could not return to where he had been before, physically or any other way—he was not as insensitive as Ray. In fact, he was the most sensitive man of all—of all who hadn’t been directly or physically affected, that is—and he hung up the phone cursing Ray and all those others getting on with their lives simply because they had survived and were literally unscathed, because, by not being like them, he was officially and utterly isolated and alone.

And what could better prove his solitary exile than what he was staring at: a blank space where all his work, correspondence and—corny as it was to say—hopes and dreams had been? He was now wandering naked in the wilderness—and by his own choice, his terrified haste the reason for the action that had stripped him. No, it was worse than that—he was a shell, a husk; everything inside of him had been erased but he was still apparently to others alive.

Once he had reached this conclusion about what he was, he was exhausted. Selwyn fell asleep on the desk in front of the laptop, which, while still running, eventually and slowly closed its own eyes, went into oblivion, and fell asleep with him.