At Union Square, the doors open and the cold from outside fills the subway car. He rises and exits, proceeding through other weather. Santos with his miles to go, his immeasurable desires to correct. To still things in motion. Aboveground, hailstones nip at his face, but something in the wild day other than rain and snow is shouting down at him.
Showing his badge he is let through a service gate behind the brownstones along West Ninth. He hops fences and crosses frozen gardens and jungle gyms encased in ice. In the middle of the block he stops at a dog's shit field. His old shoes creak in the dry snow like chalk. He shrugs at his overcoat. Frozen lines of salt rim his nose and upper lip. He has been crying. He taps at the french doors, drawing his gun halfway out of its holster.
"Nathan," he calls.
But his voice is soft, and he half desires no answer. He tries the handle and finds it turns easily in his hand and he stands there looking at it. He pushes on the door an inch or two and waits for the dog's snarl and the avalanche of paws, but he hears nothing. He throws open the door and starts in. When he hears something he doesn't like he stops where he is, pools of snowmelt collecting under his feet. The lights are on. There is nothing to be afraid of that he can see but much that he can't. For instance why he is here: because his sister is dead; because she was Nathan's sister, too, and because Nathan seduced her, or he didn't seduce her, or because he won't say; because the ties to him have become more tight and less clear and are bound to become less clear still; because there are no absolutes in human misery and things will always get worse; and because he has believed that Nathan has done nothing wrong all these years, though now he believes Nathan might do-have done-anything. He has always seen in Nathan what he envies most. Now he sees what he most despises. For every single thing about him that he once agreed with, or wanted more of, he now has another reason to see him dead. The same Nathan, who once, more than anyone he knows-certainly more than he himself-had more reasons to live.
"Nathan," he calls again. He raises his gun. "Nathan-" Somewhere, a radiator hisses.
After a while, he returns the gun to his belt, closes the door softly behind him, hops the fence and goes away into the morning.
The clutch of birds streaks across his cracked windshield at the entrance ramp to the FDR, knocking and darkening the glass, sweeping Nathan through a reverse car wash of water sounds and whirring feathers and mechanical squeal, finally peeling away to reveal a dozen lightning strikes of viscous drool. He reaches for the wipers, but he must have sucked the plastic tank dry on the Belt Parkway last night because the glass smears white as noon.
He gets out brandishing a torn square of tissue before he notices that the road he wants has been closed. The East River is running level with it, its testy new edge, white and scummy, has begun to snake across the merge. Ahead, across the river to the east, the darker clouds are steadily climbing. A new round of snow veined with mute lightning.
Nathan backs onto York and heads down Second Avenue. His cell-phone rings as this sector of lights is turning to a string of reds. His hand crawls through the glove box, landing the electric shaver and-ignoring the complaints of cabs and grocery trucks stacking up behind him-tugs at the rear-view mirror and scrubs the shaver across his face. An alarm-is it time? He sees but does not consider the face in the mirror, a face not his own. He swipes at the halo of wispy tangle atop the head, then works the shaver methodically, digging at the cleft in the chin. Finally he draws the phone, mid-ring, and leaves it mouthpiece-down amid the heather of dog hair on the seat. Some voice buzzes its protest. He calibrates the volume knob on the CD against Serena's high-pitched drone and closes his eyes on his first peaceful dark in days, in which Coltrane-the stars, the moon, the morphine sedation-is in full serenade. Depthless float. The peace and slide of a life that should have been. Other numberless and nameless things that should be. Gently, Nathan's fingers touch out a new rhythm on the steering wheel. Flamenco Sketches. The side-step lilt into the Spanish bridge, that call to the good old days, while behind, Bill Evans on his piano all sweetness and light, then like the day itself, like this day itself, turns dark and ominous. Nathan's eyelashes dampen shut. Miles, muted, the call of the lark, heralding – what, a new day or the end of this one? Sad now-not this is where we've been, but this is where we're heading. The tears are real, and adhesive. He will not open his eyes until the music ends, and it does end, badly, with a hitched fade-out. And his eyes do open, on themselves, in the rear-view mirror. He finds there chips of green ice so pale now it is hard even for him to see that there is anything behind them. So pale they look blind.
The cop in the window, an eclipse of the already sunless day, is tapping impatiently with the end of a nightstick. Nathan doesn't look. He can't bear it, or doesn't care to. Dead ahead, ahead, ahead, he blinks and toes the accelerator, the car lurches, the cop staggers back. On through the red, sending the traffic charging at his door into a screeching hook slide. He slaloms downtown around the emissions of the breathing ground, foul clouds rising from the pierced sewerlids.
Against all logic, it has grown even darker, greener. Tornado weather. Thunder explodes just overhead. Before him the vertical world, the craggy skyline, the faceless columns of the World Trade Center, has drawn nearer, towering up over the little ants, little humanity.
Alone on the sidewalk, Nathan peers up at the old building, spitting distance from the courts, a layer cake of bail bondsmen, immigration lawyers, slip-and-fall, import-exporters. All those endless hallways and their frosted doors. Milton had bought for Nathan and himself a share of an office of high-class transients, a traffic lawyer and a man named Chang, who, with his cadre of stunning and stealthy Asian secretaries, hordes secrets and smooths out the indignities caused by various anonymous factions of theChinese mob. Milton brought to the mix his own son, Nathan, Isabel, her mother, and, of course, the irrepressible Oliver Schreck.
Two red-and-white NYC sheriff cruisers, country cousins to the more officious police, squat at the curb. Some deadbeat getting snared for child support, no doubt. Or parking tickets. Nathan's got piles of his own for this car, that one, the other.
Nathan winces at the door. Is he going in? Must he go in? It seems he must.
At the sight of Nathan, the lobby man Jorge-a mere allusion to security in his toy soldier's uniform complete with gold shoulder boards-looks stricken. Nathan knows he's not looking his best. Today of all days he must make an impression.
"Que pasa."
"Que pasa."
"Un momentito, senor," Jorge suggests, finger raised as if testing the wind. "Con permiso-"
But there is court. The judge won't mind his relaxed attire. East Hampton in the offing-if anyone will understand, it will be a judge. And he is late, he is always late. But the question is, How late? He must hurry.
And that deposition to be taken uptown later -or after later? – Isabel had said so. There must also be preparations for the Riverside Drive case. Milton will be upstairs fielding calls. And now-it strikes him gravely-they have no secretary. Busy, busy, busy. -
"Hasta la vista, Jorge," Nathan says, giving a little wave.
The twenty-second-floor hallway, usually bustling at this hour, is deserted, though anything but silent. It echoes with ticking: his watch, his heart, the heels of his shoes, his conscience, impatient fingernails on some desk, the one thousand clocks of this building tracking appointments kept, appointments lost.
He stands. Has he sat? It seems he is always falling and having to get up. Now he slows. Someone, it appears, has left the door to his office open at the end of the hall. The yellow light of the reception area spills into the hallway, splashing up the opposite wall. Behind him the elevator doors clatter open and pause. No one emerges. Then no one still.