Alyona Ivanovna:
An archipelago of irregular brown islands were mapped on the tan sea of his bald head. The mainlands of his hair were marble outcrop-pings, especially his beard, white and crisp and coiling. The teeth were standard MODICUM issue; clothes, as clean as any fabric that old can be. Nor did he smell, particularly. And yet…
Had he bathed every morning you’d still have looked at him and thought he was filthy, the way floorboards in old brownstones seem to need cleaning moments after they’ve been scrubbed. The dirt had been bonded to the wrinkled flesh and the wrinkled clothes, and nothing less than surgery or burning would get it out.
His habits were as orderly as a polka dot napkin. He lived at a Chelsea dorm for the elderly, a discovery they owed to a rainstorm that had forced him to take the subway home one day instead of, as usual, walking. On the hottest nights he might sleep over in the park, nestling in one of the Castle windows. He bought his lunches from a Water Street specialty shop, Dumas Fils: cheeses, imported fruit, smoked fish, bottles of cream, food for the gods. Otherwise he did without, though his dorm must have supplied prosaic necessities like breakfast. It was a strange way for a panhandler to spend his quarters, drugs being the norm.
His professional approach was out-and-out aggression. For instance, his hand in your face and, “How about it, Jack?” Or, confidingly, “I need sixty cents to get home.” It was amazing how often he scored, but actually it wasn’t amazing. He had charisma.
And someone who relies on charisma wouldn’t have a gun.
Agewise he might have been sixty, seventy, seventy-five, a bit more even, or much less. It all depended on the kind of life he’d led, and where. He had an accent none of them could identify. It was not English, not French, not Spanish, and probably not Russian.
Aside from his burrow in the Castle wall there were two distinct places he preferred. One, the wide-open stretch of pavement along the water. This was where he worked, walking up past the Castle and down as far as the concession stand. The passage of one of the great Navy cruisers, the USS Dana or the USS Melville, would bring him, and the whole Battery, to a standstill, as though a whole parade were going by, white, soundless, slow as a dream. It was a part of history, and even the Alexandrians were impressed, though three of them had taken the cruise down to Andros Island and back. Sometimes, though, he’d stand by the guardrail for long stretches of time without any real reason, just looking at the Jersey sky and the Jersey shore. After a while he might start talking to himself, the barest whisper but very much in earnest to judgeby the way his forehead wrinkled. They never once saw him sit on one of the benches.
The other place he liked was the aviary. On days when they’d been ignored he’d contribute peanuts or breadcrumbs to the cause of the birds’ existence. There were pigeons, parrots, a family of robins, and a proletarian swarm of what the sign declared to be chickadees, though Celeste, who’d gone to the library to make sure, said they were nothing more than a rather swank breed of sparrow.
Here too, naturally, the militant Miss Kraus stationed herself when she bore testimony. One of her peculiarities (and the reason, probably, she was never asked to move on) was that under no circumstances did she ever deign to argue. Even sympathizers pried no more out of her than a grim smile and a curt nod.
One Tuesday, a week before M-Day (it was the early a.m. and only three Alexandrians were on hand to witness this confrontation), Alyona so far put aside his own reticence as to try to start a conversation going with Miss Kraus.
He stood squarely in front of her and began by reading aloud, slowly, in that distressingly indefinite accent, from the text of STOP THE SLAUGHTER: “The Department of the Interior of the United States Government, under the secret direction of the Zionist Ford Foundation, is systematically poisoning the oceans of the World with so called ‘food farms.’ Is this ‘peaceful application of Nuclear Power’? Unquote, the New York Times, August 2, 2024. Or a new Moondoggle!! Nature World, Jan. Can we afford to remain indifferent any longer. Every day 15,000 seagulls die as a direct result of Systematic Genocides while elected Officials falsify and distort the evidence. Learn the facts. Write to the Congressmen. Make your voice heard!!”
As Alyona had droned on, Miss Kraus turned a deeper and deeper red. Tightening her fingers about the turquoise broomhandle to which the placard was stapled, she began to jerk the poster up and down rapidly, as though this man with his foreign accent were some bird of prey who’d perched on it.
“Is that what you think?” he asked, having read all the way down to the signature despite her jiggling tactic. He touched his bushy white beard and wrinkled his face into a philosophical expression. “I’d like to know more about it, yes, I would. I’d be interested in hearing what you think.”
Horror had frozen up every motion of her limbs. Her eyes blinked shut but she forced them open again.
“Maybe,” he went on remorselessly, “we can discuss this whole thing. Some time when you feel more like talking. All right?”
She mustered her smile, and a minimal nod. He went away then. She was safe, temporarily, but even so she waited till he’d gone halfway to the other end of the seafront promenade before she let the air collapse into her lungs. After a single deep breath the muscles of her hands thawed into trembling.
M-Day was an oil of summer, a catalog of everything painters are happiest painting—clouds, flags, leaves, sexy people, and in back of it all the flat empty baby blue of the sky. Little Mister Kissy Lips was the first one there, and Tancred, in a kind of kimono (it hid the pilfered Luger), was the last.
Celeste never came. (She’d just learned she’d been awarded the exchange scholarship to Sofia.) They decided they could do without Celeste, but the other nonappearance was more crucial. Their victim had neglected to be on hand for M-Day. Sniffles, whose voice was most like an adult’s over the phone, was delegated to go to the Citibank lobby and call the West 16th Street dorm.
The nurse who answered was a temporary. Sniffles, always an inspired liar, insisted that his mother—“Mrs. Anderson, of course she lives there, Mrs. Alma F. Anderson”—had to be called to the phone. This was 248 West 16th, wasn’t it? Where was she if she wasn’t there? The nurse, flustered, explained that the residents, all who were fit, had been driven off to a July 4th picnic of Lake Hopatcong as guests of a giant Jersey retirement condominium. If he called bright and early tomorrow they’d be back and he could talk to his mother then.
So the initiation rites were postponed, it couldn’t be helped. Amparo passed around some pills she’d taken from her mother’s jar, a consolation prize. Jack left, apologizing that he was a borderline psychotic, which was the last that anyone saw of Jack till September. The gang was disintegrating, like a sugar cube soaking up saliva, then crumbling into the tongue. But what the hell—the sea still mirrored the same blue sky, the pigeons behind their wicket were no less iridescent, and trees grew for all of that.
They decided to be silly and make jokes about what the M really stood for in M-Day. Sniffles started off with “Miss Nomer, Miss Carriage, and Miss Steak.”
Tancred, whose sense of humor did not exist or was very private, couldn’t do better than “Mnemone, mother of the Muses.” Little Mister Kissy Lips said, “Merciful Heavens!” MaryJane maintained reasonably that M was for MaryJane. But Amparo said it stood for “Aplomb” and carried the day.
Then, proving that when you’re sailing the wind always blows from behind you, they found Terry Riley’s day-long Orfeo at 99.5 on the FM dial. They’d studied Orfeo in mime class and by now it was part of their muscle and nerve. As Orpheus descended into a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet, the Alexandrians metamorphosed into as credible a tribe of souls in torment as any since the days of Jacopo Peri. Throughout the afternoon little audiences collected and dispersed to flood the sidewalk with libations of adult attention. Expressively they surpassed themselves, both one by one and all together, and though they couldn’t have held out till the apotheosis (at 9.30) without a stiff psychochemical wind in their sails, what they had danced was authentic and very much their own. When they left the Battery that night they felt better than they’d felt all summer long. In a sense they had been exorcised.