His eyes open level with the sink. At some point he has fallen and is left now in a low squat. The taste of saltwater on his lips, his eyes burn. He squeezes a vial in his palm but it slips out and rolls to the wall. Miraculously he stands, fills the sink and slips in his rashy wrists. His eyes slide to the side, listening, his face a convergence of rivers of thought, lips twisted, one eye half closed, interrupted-
Maria here in this bed. No needles. No tubes. just a Washington Heights beauty queen and happiness once, for once real happiness, for one good year, then a second, distinctly less good, then their common verdict and three more years as cell mates imprisoned by their living death. All the while, after leaving Claire, there was his other life as a bachelor in his own downtown garden apartment. Two beds to change, two faces to wash, two sets of delinquent bills and their attendant threats. Two skies to simultaneously breathe.
He pulls the rubber stopper to let it all drain. The water slides slowly and evenly down the wall of the sink, the drain gasps, and the rest of it is sucked away.
She did this. She killed me.
"Daddy?"
A small sleepy voice. Nathan catches his own eyes in the mirror and remembers his first night alone with Benny. Maria had gone out, some place with friends. To leave the men to themselves, she'd said. But the boy fell asleep quickly. His breath pulled in and out between his bunched lips, his fine hair fanned over the pillow, the perfect skin of his pouched cheeks, flushed with heat but drained of vitality. Looking down at the boy, a dead place had opened in Nathan and he felt the terror of a child's sleep so heavy one fraction of an ounce more and slumber might slip through the skin of life and plummet through to infinity and death. He reached to the boy and lifted his arm, pudgy and kinked, to confirm for himself the boy's warmth and the hesitant breath, the steady, steady pulse. Still there. He slid a CD into the stereo, Bill Evans on piano, a blessed jangling, chattering glass, that must sound very like a dreamworld, even to a boy. He thought it might inspire something in the boy's imagination, but what would it be? What did it inspire in his own? He rattled around the apartment. He turned on all the lights, he turned on the television. He drank scotch and leafed through Vanity Fair. He moved things from here to there, touching everything he passed as if he could add the furniture and underwear and books and the smashed plastic toys and even the dog to his life's inventory and stuff that emptiness, fill it, fill it up. The music wasn't doing it. Sitting on the edge of his bed he hugged his knees and braced himself to slide across the chasm between the darkness and the time when in the blue flash of morning sun the boy appeared, resurrected, atop the big bed, apprehensively petting his mother's perfect face, just as Nathan had touched the boy's, to confirm sweet life; as Maria, the night before that night, had touched Nathan's, while Nathan faked sleep. Sweet life.
He had awoken to a scatter of black vinyl crumbs in their bed, across the floor, in his hair. The remains of his vast collection of irreplaceable LPs, his purest-maybe only – joy. These discs that ask nothing but only give and give, hurled, obviously, one after the other against the wall, entire epochs of music history, their composers, their virtuosos, annihilated, until the room looked as if it had rained coal. The cardboard jackets and their liner notes and librettos torn to bits. Maria swore it hadn't been her. Why would she have done it? Though, on the other hand, now that the records were gone, she was sorry she hadn't thought of it herself. But if it wasn't her, then who-? After all, the shards were strewn in his hair, not hers. It was his liter of Dewar's lying empty amidst the rubble, not hers-
Maria's last will and testament dangles over the sink. Nathan lights a match.
"Daddy?"
The small voice creeps up on him. He locates in the mirror the boy standing in the reflection of the living room. It takes a moment for Nathan to adjust to his realization that he knows this boy. How easy it is to forget. This child has to be somewhere. Where else would he have been but in his mother's apartment?
The paper flames brightly then quickly shrinks and blackens, run through by worms of red ash.
"What are you doing?"
"Benny, go back to bed."
"Did you see Mommy?
"I saw her. Your grandma come by after school?"
The boy nods.
"She gave you your supper?"
The boy keeps nodding. "When is Mommy coming home?"
Nathan, fugitive from a half-dozen lives, shuts his eyes, summons the lie. But what to base honesty on? These little alternative versions are superior, happier, cleaner, evidence of a better, more Just, world. The kid will sleep, he'll get through another night, another day, week. Maria can hold on another week. "Soon," Nathan says. "Soon."
Retreating, Benny turns in time to see the crack of light melt away as the door closes, leaning against the wall in wait, on the boy's face the same resigned expression-hopeless expectancy-of the expectant dog.
Eventually the boy goes back to bed, and Nathan trades the apartment for the cold. He goes down the stairs to the car, to the empty streets, and to Baron, who does not get left behind.
MIDNIGHT
She has a shadow, Claire sees. The snow is holding. The neighborhood is quiet, even the boats in the harbor. The moon, making an appearance, moves swiftly against a current of clouds, recasting the frontage street as a blue field, where the sidewalks and the approaches to the brownstones and tenement walk-ups and the jetties across the street end without warning and begin the harbor.
She takes off her coat and hangs it on her arm, half believing half wishing to feel the cold. But she doesn't, she can't, feel a thing. It's there somewhere, but the liquor, thank god, is warding it off, bracing her with a strange disaffection. But she is alive, she has an effect-nearing her street she sends dogs behind some darkened window barking, and the barking follows her up that street and around the corner and the rest of the way home.
Inside she tries to walk the hall quietly, but the floorboards are old and her care only prolongs the creaking. With the sleeve of her coat she loosens the bulb in the hallway fixture so that it will not be the light to wake the baby, should he still need waking. Through the door she hears a loud silence, the silence of someone there but not saying anything, maybe someone asleep. The door is unlocked. Some smell has set in, seeped into the floor, the walls, the drapery, slightly acrid, slightly smoky.
She swears the moonlight bends over him in luminous strips, defining the child-for he would have been a child by now, wouldn't he, not a mere infant?-spread across the mattress, not stillborn, too late for that, but still nonetheless. How odd that at birth he already had Nathan's blocky nose and eyes the color car salesmen call sea foam. The baby's hands tangled in his wispy sprigs of hair, his mouth hung open, those eyes all frozen pupil. She in her gauzy nightie had taken him on her shoulder and walked him around to get the air up, or in, but poor thing he was so floppy and limp, his boneless limbs no help at all, he couldn't hold on.
With her coat still on her arm she watches the corner beside her bed where he used to breathe. On the counter, darker shapes rise out of the darkness, a glass, an arranged plate. The window rattles. It has begun to squall again. The lamplight brings it all in: the various darknesses, the breadth of her bed, the snowshadows raining silently through the blinds, the slow tapping of a water drip, the knocking of the radiator. And here the smallest of the boy's ancient rises and collapses. Claire feels the riot of it all in her head and through her veins; she feels it leap from her heart and she wants to leap after it, bound onto the bed with her little boy in her arms to tell him how glorious it all is-how joyful, how glorious!