Seated, Nathan dials a new number altogether and hears on the other end a calm, cheerful voice, a man, his proxy: "Nathan Stein's answering service. Message please?"
In the background, the murmur of other operators, keyboards clacking. The world may be falling to pieces, but there will always be messages to leave.
Officiously, Nathan declares, "This is Nathan Stein."
He commiserates with the confusion in the operator's silence. Then he listens for and detects the disapproval. Imagine all that this clerk has heard. All the piss of Nathan's life that has run through the tips of his fingers, collecting as through a catheter in the electronic pouch at Nathan's waist. Despite the doctors and the tests and the retests and the diagnoses and the pills, it is of this that he is dying.
"Message please?" the operator says with tight obedience.
Nathan's eyes widen at the opportunity. His mouth opens. Outside, another round of twitchy lightning. There is a pause in the thunder. Listening for it, he hears instead soft cries and lamentations, wandering, carried by the wind.
"None," Nathan says, and hangs up.
3 P.M.
Hunched low to the ground, the walls patched with corrugated aluminum, the New Life Missionary Baptist Church sits like a converted outlet for discount beverages, a cross fastened like a hood ornament to the front peak over the open door. The inside is a single cavernous room carpeted with mauve industrial wall-to-cinder-block-wall, exploding up front, as if someone has thrown a grenade of violent color: hothouse flowers surround a casket with handles of painted gold. At first Nathan's body will not respond to an order of WALK. The fatigue is one reason. But there is another, and it is naked fear. He has been spotted. Strange eyes aim his way. He does not know their owners, but willing his clay feet to move one then the other he crosses the room smiling soberly and shaking hands, mumbling thank-you's to offers of sympathy and turning from inquiries after his own health. Maria's mother, older sister, and young female cousin have arranged themselves before the open casket, the mother's hand on the shoulder of the one daughter left her. Inspecting him as he comes up the aisle with his hands empty. Nathan's abandoned family.
It is the sister, Carmen, who steps forward slowly, numb with grief, the room hushing in the presence of this gravity, the soulless dance between those with competing claims. The derelict that they had all taken for the son of light himself stands before them chalky pale, withered seduction artist, thief of sweet Maria's soul.
The bloated corpse levitates behind them, the open coffin resting on a platform in a ring of flowers. Why is it open? Maria looks worse. They've greased shut her eyelids and lips; and she looks waxy, like a figurine, as if they've melted and reconstituted her in the black dress he bought for her five years ago on their first spree. Her speckled hands, crossed over her chest, clutch to her heart her thumb-worn Bible. Though after all that they couldn't carve an expression into her: her brow clear, she lies poker-faced before eternity.
Nathan bends to kiss Carmen, but she reaches up to his face as a blind person might and holds him steady, peering into his eyes as if inspecting what-if anything-lives behind them, then quickly snatches away her hands.
"Please go," Carmen whispers.
"Where is the burial?"
"We didn't think you'd be able to come."
Nathan says, half appalled, "I wouldn't have missed it." Then it strikes him that he was let out especially for this purpose. He looks over his shoulder. Two men in cheap suits stand at the doorway like bookends, full of menace rather than comfort, like prison guards, happy to let people in but blocking their escape.
"It's at Evergreens," she says, "in Queens. But you wouldn't come.
"Of course."
She exhales through her teeth a derisive laugh. "Please."
"Where's Benny?"
"No. Say nothing to him."
Nathan spots the boy sitting against the wall in a sharp double-breasted suit, his feet dangling above the floor, staring at his mother's remains. Then, lifting his head as if he's heard a whistle, he quickly bounds over, wrapping his arms around Nathan's leg and burying his face in his crotch. Nathan's hand hovers trembling over the boy's head, repulsed as if by an electric field. He lets it drop, crowning the boy with it, bestowing Benny with – what? – but crowning him nevertheless. He reaches around the boy's head and strokes the soft patch under the cranium, button of innocence, feeling in his fingertips a pulse, sign of beating life.
He is despising this, this little melodrama. Still, his eyes have begun to sting and he wraps his other arm around Benny's shoulders in full embrace, leaning into the boy's hair, sniffing his earthy, vegetable sweetness of sleep.
"Come, Benny."
It is Maria's mother who has taken the boy by the shoulders and for a moment Benny is tugged in both directions, disputed over, actually wanted. Her nostrils flaring wet and red with grief, Carmen protests, not on behalf of one side or the other, just the contest itself. A hand lands softly on Nathan's shoulder and he quickly turns his head and again, as before, finds no one there. Thus warned. He snatches back his hands as from a trap and lets Benny go. Maria's mother steers the boy to safety, handing him off to her daughter.
His face burns. His embarrassment is fierce. The entire room is looking at him. Why is he here? Why did he bother to come at all? Didn't he say his good-byes to Maria this morning with no witnesses but the dead and maybe that priest to clear the way? But here Nathan feels close to the truth, just the simple factual truth. Just as Maria last night watched, spellbound and terrified, her neighbor in her death throes, now Nathan has come to observe Maria, out of the hospital, on her way. His own dress rehearsal. And there lies her outer crust, her pod.
He wipes his hand across his sweaty forehead. "You shouldn't let Benny see his mother like that," he says.
But someone insists, "No, he should see." It is Cleary standing before him, taller somehow than this morning. The priest looks nervous, his face with that blushed, babyish swollenness of someone just woken, or sick with worry.
"Isn't all this a little fast, the funeral, the burial?" Nathan protests. "Don't you have to wait a while or something?"
Cleary's expression darkens. He glances nervously toward the door.
"Who are your friends?" Nathan asks.
"I don't know who they are," Cleary assures him. "I half believed they came with you."
"They may have," Nathan murmurs. Nearby, the heads of those talking quietly wheel around. Nathan looks at his watch. "It's getting late."
Cleary nods. "Yes, it is."
"I'm tired.”
"I understand."
"I don't think you do," Nathan replies, wondering if the pain in his stomach comes from eating nothing but his pills. He looks longingly to the back table where food is piled high.
"This tragedy will unite you and Christ in a sacred way, Cleary says.
His mind shut down behind that delicious hermetic seal, Nathan sidesteps the priest and heads for the back and picks a shortbread cookie of no identifiable shape. He slips it past his teeth. His eyes close. He can taste nothing; there is no feeling on his tongue or the roof of his mouth. The tips of his fingers, for that matter, feel like brass thimbles. It's been climbing him these last two days, this slow paralysis, giving him the strange sensation that he is turning to stone. Bites of cookie thud like pebbles at the bottom of the pail inside. This last pleasure gone.
"Nathan."
Blindly, Nathan extends his hand. But it is Cleary again.
"Do you hear me?" he asks.
"Sure.”
"You should make amends."
"What for?"
"Because a man lives his life and he has to make that important. Whether he's a priest or a lawyer. Or a bum."
"Did Maria?" Nathan demands.