We Are Here (9 page)

She started to cry, irrevocably, the tears of a child, the worst kind of all: the tears of someone who feels all the hope in the world disappear at once.

Kristina waited a few yards down the street, sadness in her face. “Lydia,” I said, but I didn’t know where to go afterward. The things it made sense to say—that the person hadn’t really been there, or was some random stoner or thief taking a back route home and who ran because he’d been startled by being chased by an elderly street person—were not explanations she was going to accept.

Instead I put my arms around her shoulders. She did not smell good and I knew there would be a significant community of small, unwelcome insect life about her clothing, so I made the hug tight but quick.

“It’s been a while,” I said, stepping back. “Maybe he was just surprised to see you. Or maybe he feels shy or embarrassed that it’s been so long.”

She gave this some thought. “You think?”

“I don’t know. But it could be. Right?”

She looked up at me hopefully, as if I’d told her that the pet we’d just buried together was absolutely
definitely
going to heaven. “Maybe you’re right.”

“You going to be okay?”

“Of course,” she said, old again. She stomped to the sidewalk to retrieve her bags. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

We watched as she headed off into the darkness that nests in the shadows of tall buildings in the night.

The next morning I called Catherine. I outlined my conversation with Clark but didn’t pass on his interpretation of her behavior, or his final message. I suggested she talk to the cops. She uttered a sound that made it seem unlikely she would follow this advice—and perhaps it was this kind of thing that caused her to rub me the wrong way. She considered her options and made selections rather than drifting along highways of least resistance. Yes, she’d dropped Thomas Clark after she’d met Mark (I hadn’t failed to notice that, in her version of events, it had happened that way around), but that made sense too. It’s a cute idea that you can remain buddies with ex-lovers, but woefully adolescent. Love is not a charm that pops into the world from a better place to bless two individuals before flitting back home, leaving the couple broken back in two parts and forlorn but fundamentally unchanged. Love is a fire that burns in the soul, sometimes for good, sometimes just for now, sometimes hot enough to scorch and sometimes with a low and sustainable glow. Either way, it leaves the original constituents permanently altered. After the fact everything is different—not just the relationship, but the people involved. I didn’t blame Catherine for what she’d done, but I was glad it wasn’t me who’d fallen in love with her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No problem,” I said. “You’ve got our numbers. You get the sense something’s up, then call, okay?”

I was about to add something designed to sound upbeat, but the line went dead. I realized that was something else that pissed me off about her. Always having to be the one in control.

Whatever. I was done. I made a cup of coffee and took it over to the rear window of the main room. I opened it and climbed out onto the ten-foot-square patch of roof outside, which I had colonized as my personal smoking domain. There’s not much competition, to be honest, what with it being inaccessible from any other building and half submerged under bits of wind-blown debris and discarded material from long-ago roof maintenance. A few birds perch there once in a while, but even they don’t seem to like it much. Soon after we moved into the apartment—disinclined to trudge down a billion stairs every time I wanted to fuck up my lungs—I semi-civilized the area with a battered chair I’d found on the street and a heavy glass ashtray from a thrift store. It’s the little piece of New York that I can call my own.

I sat and looked out across the rooftops and listened to the street noise from below, sipped my coffee, and smoked a cigarette, and I told myself the Catherine Warren story was over.

I tell myself a lot of things.

Meanwhile, Bob stands on the corner.

He is on this corner every day except weekends. He stands there between the hours of ten in the morning and four in the afternoon, and he waits. There’s always someone here. Most corners are covered only a few hours a day, to a schedule written by a Fingerman in chalk on the sidewalk or low on a wall nearby, someplace you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it. If by chance they caught your eye, you might assume they related to a scheme of public works. They don’t. A circle means daylight. The figure to the left indicates the start time, the one on the right, the number of hours it will run. A crescent works the same, but for night, obviously. At these corners you have to get there within the correct time frame or no one’s going to be around and you’re neither going to be able to leave a message, nor pick one up.

Bob’s corner is in business twenty-four-seven and three-sixty-five. There are only five like it in the whole of Manhattan, and this one at the southern point of Union Square is the oldest of all. It’s said that someone has been manning the spot for over sixty years. It could be longer, no one’s sure, but word of mouth (the testimony of trusted friends among the Gathered, be they ever so hollow now) puts it back to the late 1940s without a doubt. Before that it gets cloudy, but if you come now, someone will always be there.

These are the Cornermen, and Bob is proud to be one of them.

The first qualification is the ability to keep in movement—the right
kind
of movement. Most people don’t see past their own eyes, but there’s always someone who does, or might. Children, animals—cats especially—plus the old and the slightly crazy. You have to keep in flux or a dog might start barking or madman try to strike up a conversation. Bob’s corner is set up for movement, which might account for its longevity. There’s a lot of foot traffic. Four days a week there’s the greenmarket, plus the Strand Book Store and the B&N and Whole Foods. Even without those banner destinations it’d constitute the major crossroads at this point in town. The most noticeable features in a river are the rocks that stand their ground. And so you move.

The second requirement is a good memory. Nothing gets written down. Most couldn’t, anyway—anybody with that kind of skill would be promoted to Fingerman, which even Bob acknowledges is the premium role. Many of the messages are straightforward instructions or pieces of information. Others are more personal. When a message is given to a Cornerman, he or she will hold it in confidence until it’s passed, after which they’ll forget it. Bob doesn’t make moral judgments. It is not his place nor in his nature. Make the job any more complicated than it already is and the system would break down fast.

You need a memory for faces, too. Some will have made an arrangement ahead of time, but with many the message will be left merely in the hope the intended recipient will happen to pass. With those it’s Bob’s job to keep an eye out for the friend in question. When he sees them coming, he will move into their path and tell them what he’s been asked to tell, before moving on, glancing back to make sure the message got across.

Then Bob forgets the message, to free up space for the next. At any given time he has maybe forty in his head. Twenty percent are broadcasts—“Mention to everyone you see that …” Seventy percent are personal, one-to-one “asks”—as in: “Ask Diana to meet me at the corner of x and y at eight o’clock this Friday night.”

The remaining one in ten are the messages Bob doesn’t like. They’re the ones that never got where they were supposed to go. Once recently he happened to walk past old St. Patrick’s and saw someone against the interior wall of the boneyard there. Bob had been holding a message for this guy for over six months, but when he saw him slumped against the wall in twilight he knew it was too late. He went in and passed the message anyway, whispering it into the friend’s ear. The Hollow slowly raised his head. There was no recognition in his eyes (though Bob had passed him perhaps a hundred messages down the years) and no suggestion that he’d understood.

Now and then you’d hear someone had gone for good—getting the Bloom and burning out, or much more rarely flicking off the light by themselves. Bob wasn’t a romantic person and his expectations of life were low, but holding that last message in his head, for a person who’d passed on, was a way of giving them longer in the world, prolonging a life that had likely been full of neglect. He’d heard it was a tradition among retiring Cornermen to get a Fingerman to write down these orphaned messages, a representative word or two of them at least—on a wall or under a bridge—so they never died.

Bob didn’t know if that was true, but that’s what
he
was going to do. He’d ask Maj, probably. Maj had skills and was friendly, most of the time.

Everybody deserves to be remembered. Without that you’re nothing.

It was almost three, only an hour before he would be relieved of his post and could go somewhere warmer, when Bob saw someone heading purposefully toward him.

He immediately felt tense. This friend often had messages. Recently they had been getting more frequent. They’d stopped making sense, too, and Bob was smart enough to know that implied they were in code. Since when did friends need code? Code said there were messages that were for some ears and not others. Bob didn’t like the feel of that. They were supposed to be pulling together. That’s what his job was about and why the Gathered had always stressed its importance—doing something for the greater good. Messages for the greater good do not need to be obscured, surely?

“Hey, Fictitious,” Golzen said. He looked even more self-important than usual. “Got a broadcast.”

They always were, with Golzen. He didn’t speak—he proclaimed.

“I’m listening.”

The two men kept walking, not looking at each other, in slow circular movement, like an eddy of wind.

“Broadcast runs: ‘For the twelve. Be ready. Follow signs until Jedburgh appears.’ Message ends.”

“That it?”

“That’s all it needs,” Golzen said. “You got it?”

“ ’Course I got it.”

Golzen walked away. Bob ran the message through one time to lock it in his mind, and got ready to tell it to everyone he saw. That was his job, and he was going to do it the best he could, as always.

He had no way of knowing how many people would die.

David happened to be passing through the hall when Dawn got home. He felt guilty when he heard her key in the lock, as if he should be at his desk typing instead of self-indulgently larking about voiding his bladder.

“Just been to the john,” he said.

“Thanks for the status update.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll be sure to like and retweet.”

Then she turned him around and felt up his ass. “Well, hi,” he said, surprised.

She kept exploring his right buttock. “You keep it here, don’t you?”

“Actually, it’s around the front,” he said, deadpan. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

She swatted his chest. “Funny. Your loose change, I
meant
. You keep it in your back right pocket.”

“Well, yes. Though there’s none at the moment.”

“Right. It’s here.” She held up her other hand. Cupped in the palm was a couple of dollars’ worth of quarters. David made like a question mark.

“It was lying on the step outside,” she said. “I assumed you had a hole in your pocket and it fell out.”

“No. I put it in the pot like normal.”

“And there
is
no hole in your pocket. Which is what I was establishing, for the avoidance of doubt.”

As she plunked her bag on the chair and took off her coat, she peered into the pot on the table. The pot was squareish and unevenly glazed in unfashionable colors, the product of some long-ago creative urge or spasm of suburban boredom on the part of David’s mother, and one of the few mementoes he had of her. It held small change leavened with buttons, paper clips, and a couple of dollar bills. “So what was this doing outside?”

“No idea. Where was it, exactly?”

“Top step. Right in the middle.”

As Dawn headed kitchenward to begin assessing her charges’ entanglements with the mysteries of basic math, David looked back at the three steps that led down from their door to the path and then out at the street.

There was nothing to see except a cloudy, darkening sky and the branches of trees that were starting to shiver from the top down.

David read a little more of Talia’s book while putting together a pasta/salad dinner. The novel was … surprisingly okay, in fact. He’d already lost track of who the characters were, who they were in conflict with and why, but he decided to let it wash over him on the assumption that it would probably become clear. In the meantime it was easy to read and occasionally pretty funny or moving and in general starting to freak David out, through demonstrating he wasn’t special after all and clearly
anyone
could write—and look, Talia wrote a
lot
more than he did, every day and all the time, without making such a big song and dance about it.

When supper was on the table, they ate in companionable silence, listening to the world outside. The wind was now buffeting the house with serious intent. Local news said it was going to be a big storm.

“That was nice,” Dawn said, setting her fork aside. There were a couple of mouthfuls left, but David had come to believe this was not a negative review but an ingrained nod toward keeping an eye on her weight.

“We aim to please.”

“You didn’t come by the school today, did you?”

“No. Why?”

“Angela thought she saw a man standing outside the gates, mid-afternoon. When she went to see what he wanted he’d gone. She said it could have been you.”

“I’ve been here all day.”

“Working hard.”

“Right. And why would I come to the school anyway?”

“That’s what I said. I also reminded her of the existence of cell phones. I like Angela, but I’m amazed she can find her way out of the house every morning.”

“Maybe she leaves a paper trail. Of unmarked art assignments.”

Dawn didn’t reply. Normally the good-hearted dissing of her co-workers was something she enjoyed. She was not the kind of person to ever be rude to their faces, and didn’t really
mean
most of it, but it was her low-key way of letting go of daily frustrations.