Isn’t she a beauty? My brother said hurriedly. He meant the car.
What the hell are you doing showing me this Porsche? Let’s get this over with, okay?
What’s the rush?
It was dented up. In a way that, for me, exactly recalled an earlier car crash and an earlier victim, which is to say that the passenger side was mashed, one headlight completely eliminated, and I’m pretty sure the axle was bent and the front fender mangled up in there, rubbing against the oil pan. There was flourescent gunk running in my driveway.
I just hosed this driveway.
Hey, I’m sorry, Jack said. Listen, I just want to know if I can park this in your garage for a couple of days.
I looked at my Timex with imitation Cordovan strap and wondered why eighteen minutes for this request. He had his own car dealership where he worked, and his own auto mechanics who would bang out a few dents, no questions asked, and he had always boasted that he could get an inspection sticker for me easy. It was not a good sign, his request, and I asked why I had to have this car in my garage, and he said that he’d busted it up right nearby, out on the river road, and he had things to do, and some points on his license, and just wanted to leave it for a couple of days, wouldn’t be any trouble, and he’d buy me a case of beer or something to make it worth my while.
And that was when I noticed the blood inside. The interior of the Porsche was leather, a ruddy leather interior, and there was blood on the dash, on the molded foam, where the air bag would later have gone, there was a dried splotch of blood from where some forehead had collided with the windshield, and I squinted at it discerningly, at the inevitability of another life coming to an end, the failure of it, of life leaking out on the leather.
Is this blood in this car?
What the hell are you talking about? My brother replied.
I asked if this was blood.
There’s no blood in the car. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Why was a spillage of blood always an emblem of my troubled march in this world, why these pieces of bodies, these cascading morsels of corporeal material, why this length of tibia broken jaggedly off at the knee, with tufts of muscle still clinging to it, why, in my dreams, the stretcher bearers, why the dead boys, why the high-impact collisions, again and again, why the spectacle of young men running into stationary objects, why the lamppost with the D.U.I. wrapped around it, a hand separated from a wrist, by some fifty feet, vertebrae like popcorn scattered across the bucket seats?
I said, Get your goddamn car out of here now, what do you mean by bringing this thing around here? Did you kill someone, in this car? Am I accessory to all your blunders? Like I don’t have enough blunders of my own? What are you doing here? I’m not related to you, I don’t have even one characteristic that you have. I started loud, admittedly, but I got quieter, because I knew, in the middle of my tirade I knew, this fragmentary bunch of people, this collection of lost souls, my family, they were rushing further off now, like some distant hurtling margin of the negatively spherical universe, they were further off during this conversation, and when this conversation was over, they would be impossibly far away—cousins, aunts, uncles, of old bipolar Eire, my father, there would be only my mother’s death left to survive, my mother alone in her little house in New Rochelle one block over from a shuttered Main Street, and when my brother climbed into his Porsche — which had a left front flat, I now saw — the last of my uncertain futures would be certain.
With a fluttering of his pinky-ringed hand, my brother tried to get me to play cool. I’m gone before you know it Man, if I came here singing songs of love, even then you’d bounce me out on my ass.
Now the backing away of my brother Jack, blond dealer of exotic high-performance cars, future dealership owner. I waited for the threatening language, but the silence of his departure was instantaneous. Iwill not punish your sons when they commit whoredom. I knew, I knew. I knew where the police would find the body of poor Elise from the club called Silver Screen, out by the woods at the edge of the golf course in Pelham. There’s always trouble at the edge of this golf course, you know, because it’s the edge of New York City, it’s the beginning of the suburbs, and every threshold must have its darkness, and so Elise, who was incested when young, got driven to the edge of this wood, where she drank wine with my brother, and they kissed, and they cavorted, and they lived such lives as I have never lived, and then they took a dirt road there, by the edge of the canal, where there were only torched hulks of cars, stripped of all but the smoking exterior chassis, the steering column, muffler, disc brakes, upholstery all gone, my brother, at thirty-four miles per hour in an avenue zoned for twenty-five, drove into a tree, knocked her unconscious, ditched her body, flung away its wedding band, and then after the visit to me abandoned the stolen car, the car he brought into the city to impress her, or to impress someone like her, and he waded down into the lifeless river just beyond the woods, and he dove in, in his Armani suit, drifted downstream, in a narcissistic reverie. Leaving no trail.
Remember Melissa Abdow? The girl who saw Bobby Erlich’s crash? Amazing thing. She called last week, at work. (The surfaces of my cubicle are appallingly clean. My rolodex is blank. Here’s a photograph of Tanya wearing a yellow dress.) Melissa wanted a little advice on the inverted yield curve, What’s going to be the effect on treasuries, as a conservative type of investment? She and her husband were trying to salt away some funds for their kid’s college education. And she got my number from somebody who got it from somebody. Research, that morning, had brought in some disappointing news from the markets. It was also scrolling across my computer screen. Full kingdom blessing on traders of bonds, they shall run like mighty men. The horseman lifteth up the bright sword. That I.P.O. for the new web portal is going to sell out fast. Melissa asked about my brother. How’s Jack anyway? Something in my tone made her ask, I knew, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. If it’s possible for a voice to have worry lines, Melissa’s voice had them, when she was speaking to me. My brother? My brother, Melissa? I started and I couldn’t stop. I admitted that I hadn’t seen my brother in years, seven years, that he had married a lovely girl, Elise, and I didn’t go to his wedding, you know, I smote you with blasting and with mildew, because I was ashamed; he had smashed up Elise’s brother’s Porsche not long before the ceremony, cut himself kind of badly, and he came to me for aid and counsel, and I drove him out of the house, and you know how it is with brothers, Melissa, you know how it is.
My wife keeps calling down the basement staircase to where I’m sitting here enveloped in darkness, tightening wood screws on a small racing car that I have made for my nephew, Danny. I have made him many toys. A day of darkness, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as morning spreads upon the mountains, the bugs are kind of bad down here, Take me and cast me into the sea. This basement with its cinder blocks and its exposed bulb, this suits me. Seven years now, a biblical interval, and it was just a little thing. I was a jumpy, anxious person, hard to get along with, I suppose; amazing that I have kept my job this long, when I cannot be comforted. It was just some car that I refused to have in my garage, you would think that would be enough, that it could be forgotten. And I haven’t even set eyes upon my brother’s boy, except in that Christmas card that came this last year (his hair like a crown of goldenrod), and there’s Elise, with the strawberry-highlights, I don’t get too many cards, it’s almost a week now here that I have been worrying about the boy, waiting for my brother to call, our Chevy is gassed and ready. There was a time when everybody knew the future, but a few wise types elected to forget what was to come, as we all elect, eventually, to forget the past. Forgetters raised up many children and made songs of praising, I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. Please let me be wrong again. About that sick boy. Let me be wrong.