“Jesus, what’d you hit him wit’?” says a plump dark-haired woman, her voice filled with awe. She’s wedged into a stool.
“Nothing,” Cormac says. “He swung and he missed.”
His hand trembles as he lights another cigarette. He realizes that he hasn’t had a fight in a saloon in almost sixty years. That is, since the week after Pearl Harbor. Fights in saloons end up in police stations, places he can’t afford to visit. He inhales deeply. The smoke is delicious. The bar turns noisy again, the broken glass swept up, the blood mopped away. The customers resume their noise. A cell phone rings, but it isn’t Cormac’s. The owner comes over.
“Sorry about that,” he says. “He’s usually pretty harmless, Frankie, as big as he is. Works for Verizon, loves the Mets. But he lost his wife, maybe six weeks now? Two months? Whatever. Anyways, he hasn’t been right in the head. They had no kids, except Frankie, and now he’s another lost soul. One of the guys is driving him to Saint Vincent’s.”
“Ah, shit,” Cormac says. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” the owner says. “You didn’t kill his wife. Life did. Hey, have one on me.”
“Thanks,” Cormac says, and gazes out the window.
Kongo is across the street. He nods, and Cormac leaves his change and hurries to the door.
113.
They embrace on the corner and start walking together toward the river. Kongo is wearing a zipper jacket and jeans, like a million other men in the autumnlike city. Silver is scratched into his hair, and there’s a melancholy look in his eyes. His grave voice is deeper, his accent more refined and English. They talk about how much the city has changed since they were young, how their small shared village became the metropolis. Cormac tells Kongo of the image he sometimes sees from the top of a skyscraper: a huge sculpture, thirteen miles long, two miles wide, the island of Manhattan being shaped by a restless unknown hand, a godlike artist who is never satisfied, forever adding elements here, erasing them there, lusting for perfection.
“On the final day,” Cormac says, “after due warning to the citizens, the god of New York will lift his creation into the sky. It will be thirteen miles high, its base in the harbor, the ultimate skyscraper.”
Kongo laughs.
“You could see that New York from Africa, Kongo.”
“I’ve never stopped seeing New York, Cor-mac.”
He doesn’t explain where he has been, nor does he ask Cormac about his own long life. Kongo inhales the odor of the unseen river, and mentions a river in Gabon that has the same mixture of river and ocean salt. “If you are wounded on its banks,” he says, “the salt will heal you.” Cormac talks about how he has read his way into Africa through a hundred books, absorbing the narrative of slavery and colonization and the bloody struggle of the twentieth century to be free at last; and how he used to listen to the memories of Africans in New York, and lived to see all memory, African, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish, English, all memory of injury and insult, all nostalgia for lost places and smashed families, all yearning for the past: saw all of it merge into New York.
“I see it every day,” Kongo says.
“It’s harder to see if you live it one year at a time,” Cormac says. “There’s too much of it. Too many faces, too many people, too many deaths and losses.”
Kongo looks at him. “I’m an old man too,” Kongo says. “Just like you. But one thing I’ve learned, after all the bloodshed and disease and horror: Forgetting is more important than remembering.”
“Yes,” Cormac says. “But memory goes on, Kongo. In the end, all men and women say the same thing: I was, therefore I am.”
They are at the river now, on a new path cut along the waterfront for joggers and bicycle riders. A pair of lovers huddle on a bench. A wino sleeps on another. There’s a bicycle chained to a tree. The river is a glossy ebony bar. Lights twinkle on the distant Jersey shore, close enough to touch, yet beyond distance.
“Your frontier,” Kongo says, and chuckles.
“Yes,” Cormac says. “The border.”
A small yacht moves south toward the harbor, lit up like a child’s toy.
“Well, you know why I’m here,” Kongo says.
“I think I do.”
Kongo leans on a rail, gazing at the darkness.
“You have the sword,” he says. “That allows you to settle the affair of your father, to bring it to an end.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve found the woman at last.”
“A wonderful woman.”
Kongo glances at him, as if trying to decode the sentence. And then goes on.
“When you’re finished with the affair of your family,” he says, “you must take her to the cave. To the cave where you were given your… gift.” He speaks like a commander issuing orders, glances at a clock on an old industrial building, then turns back to the river. “You will make love to her in the cave.” A pause. “And then you can cross over.”
His words are at once a promise and a sentence.
“I’ll help get you there,” he says. “You’ve got one week.”
They stand in silence for a long time. Then Kongo turns and walks toward the bicycle that is chained to a tree trunk. He turns a key in the lock.
“Wait, Kongo, don’t go yet.”
“I’m not going. I’ll be here in New York.”
“There are a hundred things I want to talk about with you,” Cormac says.
Kongo shrugs and exhales, as if there’s nothing at all he wants to discuss.
“How do I find you?” Cormac says.
“I’ll be around,” Kongo says in Yoruba. “Don’t worry.”
He smiles and swings onto the bicycle and pedals away to the north. From the blackness of the unceasing river, Cormac hears a foghorn.
I was, he thinks, therefore I am.
114.
There’s an e-mail waiting when he opens the computer the next morning. In this latest edition of the world, e-mail evades the overheard whisper, the visible evidence of flirtation, the eye of the private investigator. Combined with the cell phone, it makes cheating easier, and life more dangerous. Cormac: I’m at work, and still have a job. Que sorpresa! Can I come by around 12:15? Can’t wait for anything formal. Gotta see you. Love, D
He sends an e-mail back, saying twelve-fifteen is fine, and he’ll order sushi. He lights a cigarette, using a saucer for an ashtray.
She arrives at twelve-ten, breathless after walking from the office to Duane Street, a fine film of sweat on her skin. She’s smartly dressed in a navy blue business suit, smiling and radiant. Her skin is darker from the sun, and tinged with red. She kisses his cheeks and lips and neck, pushes her belly into his, grasping for buttons and belt. He lifts her out of her shoes. Her skirt falls, her jacket, blouse, and bra. They make writhing, gnashing love on the table. And then fall back into panting languor. They laugh, as if they’ve gotten away with something.
Then he turns, slides to the floor, goes to the kitchen, and takes the sushi and sashimi from the refrigerator.
Delfina vanishes into the bathroom with her clothes, washes quickly, combs her hair, dresses, returns to sit down to the platter of food, glancing at the clock. No review. No accounting either.
“Buenas tardes, mi amor,” she says, and smiles.
“Buenas tardes,” he says. Then adds, “How was it?”
Her gaze falls on him, tentative, choosing what she will tell him.
“All right,” she says. “Considering.”
A smile plays on her face. Away off, he can hear a siren from NYU Downtown pushing through lunchtime traffic.