Serena in leather pants and a gauzy blouse entered the confessional. He heard her crying. A dark figure in dark robes slipped through the wooden locker's curtains and the slide shot back and instantly there was a faint murmuring, as if from an old endless ramble never interrupted. Nathan kept his watchful eye on the statuary, expecting the worst. The stained glass of the windows deadened by the day's hazy overcast. Random panels replaced with murky plexiglass. Here and there, a saint was pierced and lit in cobalt blue and a diluted orange among the pews. The distant hiss of traffic on the Grand Concourse. In four or five months, during the quiet of a Sunday mass, Nathan knew the pagan roar from Yankee Stadium would inspire the lines of little Christian boys in white fitted frocks to near riot and the material ghosts slumped in the nave to titters.
In the confessional Serena's admissions became a singsong chant, and Nathan, having seen it before, saw her then: eyes glued with tears, hands twitchy, her pouched lips puckered and waving at the air to let out the stumbling flood, failing to keep up with the list of her transgressions: the lines of coke; the unmade phone calls to a grandmother left in San Juan like an old plant too dusty to clean; her obsessions with the gringo out in the pews, the accelerant to an already aimless life. Meanwhile, in Nathan's ears, the church-building murmured with tales of misdemeanors and fratricide and a shepherd in search of his flock and women sentenced to eternal damnation and a ram slaughtered and disemboweled and offered up to an unrepentant and hungry Lord. No respecter of persons. Nathan's grief at what he had done. These evil-doing and sex-crazed vagabonds. Good men gone to seed, bringing on the great storm. A drowned race of perilous incurables. Six-hundred-year-old Noah captaining his floating zoo. And that was only Genesis.
A hand shook Nathan gently. He had been sleeping. He looked up into a wan and featureless face, very like that of his clients, a man in powder-blue jumpsuit and clerical collar. Serena close behind him, clutching her sequined handbag as though it contained the ashes of her incinerated misdeeds.
The priest, in Puerto Rican accent: "Are you waiting to confess?"
Nathan slowly pushed himself off the bench. A shadow off to the side scuttled for the deeper dark. A string of whoops from a passing fire engine approached, whined by, and bent into the distance. Movement above, in the lightless rafters, the flutter of birds.
No.
Serena threw the priest a knowing and resigned look.
"I'm tired," Nathan said.
"Nathan," Serena begged.
The priest tilted his head, confused. "Excuse me?"
"I'd just fallen asleep."
Nathan sidestepped into the aisle, his hand raised protectively to his forehead. "Maybe tomorrow," he murmured.
Serena's voice raised to a shriek, a little girl on the run, a tearful drizzle. "Nathan, just say sorry!"
The priest was waiting. Was he? Am I, am I? "Of course," Nathan replied. "I'm sorry."
" Stein?
"Nathan?"
Ruth stands before him, her face bunched with concern. Nathan feels the brick of cash in his inside blazer pocket and, lifting his head, closes his eyes. Milton will reel him back in. Hours from now he’ll be out. Another forty-eight, and, offshore, the sunlight will snake its way through and he will inspect the changeless shapes of the sky and study the thunder of surf. He will drink tequila while standing ankle-deep in white sand.
"Ready to go?" the sheriff asks.
Nathan blinks, afraid of the answer. "Where?"
10 A. M.
An hour passes as the hours will pass here. In this concrete room the iron door clanks shut the wrong way. The holding cell murmurs with the hyperintensity of men who are not yet the state's wards, prisoners only of the moment, still with lives to lose. Nathan receives sidelong glances from jailers he's known for years, men he's paid off for a variety of client services, women, food, extra minutes. Now his pockets hang down along his legs like socks. His shoes, stripped of their laces, flop like slippers. He clutches his blazer to his chest like a life preserver. A high naked bulb dangles from the ceiling, directing the light nowhere.
He hangs on the bars and peers out. Someone in an orange jumpsuit is coming backward down the hallway dragging a plastic bucket on wheels by a mop submerged in brown sludge. Across the hall, in another cell, a darker corner sputters in laughter. Nathan catches the eye of the man there, a shawl over his shoulders, his face darkly greased, the eyes and mouth whited out like a miner's. "Don't look at me," he says.
Nathan turns and finds himself admired by a man cradling himself in his reedy arms, a horse whinny leaping from his lips, as if identifying him as either potential prey or long-lost kindred spirit. Nathan rolls his blazer and curls on the only spot left him, a square of concrete slab beside an unflushed porcelain bowl half filled with liquid shit. Pale winter light falls through the welded iron windows. He can see upside down the crown of Yankee Stadium; the belly of a plane vanishing, crashing the wrong way into the clouds. He shuts his eyes to sleep, but on the back of his lids sees mirrored there his own pale stare.
"What are you?"
Nathan raises his head to a huge black man seated against the wall, his legs stretched before him. His neck spreads like armored wings to the nubs of his shoulders.
"Same as you," Nathan says.
"I don't believe so." He looks at Nathan's shoes. He looks at the bites and scratches on Nathan's arms. They are beginning to stink. "What did you do, yell at your wife?"
"I'm not married."
"I'm not married either. Not after this morning. I just killed her. Her and her boyfriend. Ice pick, man." He brings down his arm once, slowly, to demonstrate. "Daily News said I'm tomorrow's page one."
"Impressive."
The black man shrugs. "But I don't know anymore since that fucker came in." He aims his finger like a rifle across the room. "Dude did the same thing, but he used an ax."
Like a child lost in a parade Nathan peers through the crooks of elbows and crotches at the man who was scrutinizing him. A beacon of peaceful madness in the hubbub. His lips are waving, his head twitching, as if in animated conversation.
Nathan turns back to the double murderer. Hands pillowy and worn like leather mitts, like tools. "Maybe you shouldn't admit things so freely."
"It's what I did."
"The beauty of things," Nathan replies, eyes fluttering closed for an instant, as if awaiting a symphony's fateful moment. "It doesn't matter what you actually do. It's what you say."
A small smile creases the face. "You aren't a lawyer, are you?"
Nathan shrugs.
"Shoot. Legal counsel." He slaps Nathan's shoulder. Others have overheard and squint uncertainty in Nathan's direction. "I'm going to need a lawyer."
"I can't help you."
"You'll get out. What did you do, anyway?"
Nathan sees no reason to hold back. In here, a sort of homecoming. He's with his kind. Anyway, he's with what he knows.
"Pissed off a judge."
"Hell. How did you do it?"
"She wanted to see my taxes."
"Why didn't you give the judge your taxes?"
Nathan shrugs. "I never file them."
The man laughs. "My kind of lawyer."
Nathan can't resist. It comes to him as easy as breath. "Then one thing."
"What's that?"