"Nathan, my god-"
"Of course I see the romantic predicament you two are in. I'm not angry about you and Claire. In a way I was glad it was you."
Santos runs his hands over his face. "How do you do it? How do you make everyone want to kill you, and then want to save you?"
"We're tied together, Errol. We grew up together. You don't kill your friends."
Santos drops a step back. "There's a point when you do. There's a point when you have to, when they're the only ones worth killing.
"And worth dying for," Nathan adds.
Usually, Nathan is slippery, his eyes skipping along the surface of things, skidding, his hands fidgety. But now he seems to still, his eyes focusing, leveling at Santos a steady stare. "There's something you don't know."
His breath thin and thinner. Santos looks at Nathan warily. "Tell me one thing I don't know."
"You don't want it."
"I want it."
"You'll have to talk to Ellie."
"My mother would be happier dead right now. She's in no condition. What does my mother have to do with this?"
"You won't ask her?"
No.
Leaning, Nathan whispers something in Santos's ear. Santos coughs into his fist, his chest hard as wood. His heart thuds, getting hot.
As Nathan speaks, Santos raises and lowers his arm two or three times, trying to compose the news out of the air. Then a headache, sudden, blinding. Squeezing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, he feels the weight of the whole of the city behind him, the permanent daylight, the trace lamplight, the lightning beyond the clouds. At night in this city, around every corner everyone a potential murderer, everyone a potential murder. Santos sees how he used to wake as a boy in the night in terror of the uninvited ghouls that crouched in the dark corners of his room. The imagined gargoyles and demons that dropped from incandescent webs. He sees his parents and their one boy and two girls and the stretches of angry silence that sent them to opposite ends of a small apartment. He sees the last time he and his sister touched: adults outgrown in their childhood home she ripped the phone out of his hands for no reason at all and he pinned her shoulders to the wall. A spat that lovers might have. Fighting the hideous urge to kiss her. Calmly, she threatened to scream, Rape. And then she did scream it. She took a breath, looked at him, her eyes full of mischief, then screamed it again. His glare dimmed and his hatred softened and he considered the line between lust and indifference and the fact of their blood relation, and he released her. She screamed a third time, at first he thought for the hell of it. Though she seemed to mean it. She was shrieking, tearing at her hair, as if she saw someone else in him, someone worth running from. And maybe he was, someone to run from. He sees her coming at him with a pair of scissors and he sees himself fighting her off, flinging her across the bed and turning and running away, and boarding the downtown bus he leaned his head against the plexiglass and closed his eyes. Remorse in his throat like a hot cinder. He hadn't seen her since, until today.
Somehow did he know?
Because of Isabel's green eyes? Because he couldn't bear to see her again, because he wrote them both off-her and Nathan together, Nathan because of what he'd become, Isabel because of what she'd always been? He'd understood that of course he'd be able to have, possess, love, neither of them. They shone in a secret constellation in which he was some imploded, snuffed star, at the center of which, drawing everyone in, unseen, menacing as a black hole, hovered Milton Stein.
The day he said goodbye to them all he rode the bus and walked the Brooklyn Bridge to Claire's apartment and for the first time, with hardly a word between them, they made love; as though she understood as well as he, as though she had been waiting for him, or half expecting him. It was blind sex fueled by a lusty terror of the truth. They were both Nathan's dupes, patsies, and foolishly Santos believed he was making Claire an offer of reconciliation, to generously fill the void left by Nathan with something better, at least something honorable. He would love her as she deserved to be loved. But he was only filling himself. The spic apprentice. And he knows now that he was thinking he wouldn't miss a sister he had coveted for unnatural reasons but may never have actually had. And he was thinking that those things we go out of our way not to ask we know to be true.
All that we have done, Santos sees now, all that we do, is no longer a question of rehabilitation. It is, like everything, merely a question of outlasting the consequences.
Winded, buried in worlds of his own making, he squats in the snow like an ape, his back to Nathan, crying openly. "God help you," he says.
He hears the heavy door behind him swing open then closed. A lock turns. Nathan's footsteps fade down a hallway. Santos grips the iron banister and hoists himself up and turns and steps down to the sidewalk, and with a drunk's meticulousness crosses the street through a circle of spotlit snow and fades into the dark other side.
Inside, the lamps are off. The dark smells like a sleeping child, warm pungent. Outside, Santos's car pulls away and fades down the street.
A low light comes on against a far wall. Nathan quickly steps through a doorway. Another, distant lamp comes on: an unmade bed, a nightstand littered with prescription vials; an IV propped in a corner; a black brassiere draped over the back of a chair.
Heading for the bathroom, Nathan stops at the bed. The pillows are dented, the sheets wrinkled, the blankets thrown back. Evidence that he has lain here. Of Maria as she was five years earlier, dancing with her girlfriend in the middle of Limelight's dance floor. The gray cashmere wrap keeping her to small twitchy movements, ginger motions of hips and shoulders, not restraint as much as a suggestion of wider possibilities. Her head tossed back, her hands running up and down her own thighs, she seduced the room with her self-sufficiency.
Nathan had been standing in his suit with his elbows propped up against the bar, his briefcase wedged between his feet. It was a Wednesday night. He was not the only man alone, or wearing a suit, or the only one with his eyes trained on her, but at two o'clock he was the only one to walk over. She looked at his briefcase, then up at him, as if he were breaking some rule. And he was, he was sure. He wasn't dancing. She looked at him again. He asked for her phone number. She didn't hesitate, but she didn't seem to give it much thought. He called one week later. She said no, he'd waited too long. The next night he arrived at her apartment with flowers, and the night following he picked up her things and her boy and by morning she had her name on his mail slot and her mail forwarded to East Eighty-ninth Street and Benny was pulled out of that school and put into this one. The delivery trucks came and went. A new bed. A new 'TV. A desk and chair for Benny. An Electrolux. A thoroughbred English pointer Maria named Baron. In the morning Nathan opened his eyes to the smell of coffee and Maria standing before the mirror making, again, small movements of hips and shoulders in her new tweed suit, with flowers in her hair.
Nathan opens a dresser drawer and feels along the bottom beneath the underwear. He opens another drawer, then another. He sweeps his hand under the mattress, squeezes the pillows. He flips clothes, tosses shoes. Stacks of paper topple. A bottle of perfume upends and fills the room with sickly sweetness. Under something, behind something else, Maria's jewelry box: inside, a legal-sized envelope. Nathan slips out the contents. Maria Rosa. Last Will and Testament. Revised a month ago, prepared by, dated by, signed and notarized by one Oliver Schreck. Nathan's quivering finger rests on Roatan. On Benny.
A medicine cabinet opening, he prowls through the contents. Full prescription vials fall clattering like maracas to the sink. He counts pills and puts them between his teeth and bites. He picks another vial and overturns it and cups the entire contents in his palm and stares into the mirror, looking at nothing, not even himself.