“Just go,” I told the cabdriver.
“Where?”
“Just away from here.”
After a few minutes of riding around, I gave the driver my address. When we got there, I instructed him to park nearby, behind some garbage Dumpster halfway down the block. I scrutinized the driver while we waited. He was an ogre from the very heart of Africa, a man of few words who took shit from no one. This was my man, I told myself. Nothing was going to faze this guy. And money was not a problem because there was three hundred dollars in my brother-in-law’s wallet.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to hide here,” I told the driver, crouching on the floor of the backseat and greasing his hand with a hundred-dollar bill. “Go up to the fifth floor of that building and let me know if there is anyone there. Go in the apartment, check everywhere, the bathroom, the kitchen, everywhere. If there’s no one there, check the roof, just a look, and come down and let me know. There’s no lock on the door. I just don’t want to run into my drunk of a husband, you know. He hits me when he drinks. No big thing, you have nothing to worry—”
“I’m not worried,” he cut me off. It seemed he’d done this kind of thing before.
“If you run into him, just say you must have the wrong floor.”
“I can take care of myself, miss.”
“Good, I’ll wait for you here.”
Ten minutes later, the driver returned. Good as new.
“He’s in there alright,” he told me. “On the roof. Some tall blond dude?”
“Then let’s wait till he comes out. I’ll stay down here and you keep a lookout. I have another fifty. Easy money. Just tell me when he leaves.”
“There goes the son of a bitch,” the driver announced forty-five minutes later. “That’s the dude on the roof.”
And sure enough, it was him — hands in pockets, head buried under the upturned collar of his jacket. Sleepy Joe walked down the street and out of sight.
“Wait for me here,” I said to the driver. The plan was to go quickly into the apartment, get Hero, some clothes, especially the stuff Pro Bono bought me for the trial, which I had left sitting out, and leave there forever.
“Hero?” I started calling him. “Hero? Hero! Come here, my little doggy, where are you, my precious? Where you hiding? Come to Mommy. Don’t be afraid; Joe’s gone; the monster’s not here.” But nothing. I looked for him under the sofa, behind the refrigerator, in the bathtub, the closets, nothing. He had to be somewhere. He always used to hide really well when Sleepy Joe was around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere and it was not that big of an apartment. I climbed up to the roof, already very freaked out, I knew he couldn’t even climb up there in his state, but I went to check. The sun was already hitting the tar full force, and the remains of Joe’s ceremony were scattered all about. Candle stubs, little wax puddles, a few rags blown by the breeze, and a thread of smoke from incense still burning. That’s it. Now that I’m telling you this, Mr. Rose, I recall this amazing nightclub I once went to with Sleepy Joe because Greg was out of town tending to some problem in his other house. Sleepy Joe and I went dancing, my idea — I paid for it and chose the place, a nightclub named Le Palace that was one of the most astonishing places I had seen in my life, with music blasting so loud that I felt it vibrating inside of me, and that extravagant mob flying on Ecstasy and drinking tons of water, women showing off their tits, the trannies wrapped in sequins and feathers, the couples amid the incredible high-tech laser light show. Four floors of live music, and I floated amid the lights and careless laughter as if I were inside a fish tank, not knowing for sure if all that was real or if I was just dreaming. Needless to say, I had an amazing time, even if Sleepy Joe was in a shitty mood and had to be dragged to the dance floor. But in the middle of it all, I lost an earring. It was a little gold stud that I really liked but I hadn’t even noticed I had lost it till I got home. So the following morning, I had to go back to the nightclub and see if I could find the earring. The place was closed but the workers let me in while they looked, and I was shocked. In the light of day, the spell from the night before was shattered. Imagine Cinderella’s world after the clock strikes twelve. The so-called Le Palace was just an empty soulless warehouse area, a really gloomy place, deathly silent and with battered furniture covered with dust, badly painted black walls, torn curtains, a suffocating smell of cigarettes, and garbage in every corner. In the light of the day, the nocturnal paradise was reduced to ashes. Now, on the roof of my building, I looked with the same unease at what remained of the great ceremony my brother-in-law had conducted. It was so desolate, such an inconsequential place, littered with broken toys. That was the feeling I had, as if I were seeing the remnants of a children’s game. The whole scene was nothing more than a poor imitation, an absurdity instead of a real ritual. And that had been the horrible scene, the dark nightmare? I swear I felt ridiculous about the ghosts I had invented in my head. Where had that unwarranted fear that had left me paralyzed just a couple of hours before come from? But then I found something that congealed the blood in my veins. It was something so frightening that my legs weakened and I fell to the ground. I had to cover my mouth to stifle the scream that escaped from me, in pieces, almost comical, like one of those doomed girls in a horror film. What followed was something visceral, absolute terror. I saw Hero. Sleepy Joe had nailed him to the wall. My doggy. Sleepy Joe had nailed my dog to a wall up there on the roof. There was Hero crucified, bleeding, and already dead. I bent over at the waist clutching my stomach as if someone had kicked me there. I was paralyzed by the pain, the horror, the anguish, the trembling, shaking like a leaf, Mr. Rose. When I was finally able to react, I pulled the nails off, washed the wounds, kissed Hero’s snout, and stroked his body a long time, crying over him, and then I placed the remains in a pillowcase.
From Cleve’s Notebook
I hadn’t known anything else about María Paz since the workshop at Manninpox had ended. But I thought a lot about her, all the time, I should say. I was hooked to her pain, tangled to her hair, dreaming of her eyes, maddeningly wanting to touch her legs. Who knew if I would see her again, and the uncertainty was killing me. When I tried to visit her in prison, they told me she wasn’t there anymore. Her old friends couldn’t tell me anything about her because they had not heard from her. And then one morning, I’m on Facebook and I get a friend request. I always deny them, hating these intrusions from strangers. But this one said, “Juanita wants to be your friend.” I had no idea who this Juanita was, but it was a Latina name and I immediately thought that perhaps it might help if I became friends with her in relation to María Paz. Instinct? Premonition? Neither, really, more like desperate love. How many times had I answered the phone convinced it would be her, and nothing? How many times had I followed some woman down the street thinking it could be her, and nothing? And now another time, this friend request on Facebook, which I immediately thought could be connected to her. And it was. This time it was.
María Paz had been looking for me through her friend, this Juanita getting in touch. So we arranged to meet that afternoon in Central Park, and because I was coming from the Catskills, full of hope and very jittery, I almost killed myself on the way down trying to get there on time. The meet-up was somewhere she had proposed, near the statue of Alice in Wonderland, right in the heart of the park.
I can’t say that there was anything exciting about that first moment, anything romantic. Something wasn’t right, something had broken, and things were different than they had been in Manninpox. I had spent weeks going over in my mind each of those moments of shared complicity, those sudden bursts of excitement, those shocks of illicit attraction between us. But at the park, all that was gone. In the plain light of day, in an area reserved mostly for children, with her as free as I was, no guards watching us, no rules and regulations to follow, the magic had gone. We were a couple of strangers, she without a uniform, all made-up, her hair longer, a flashy pair of earrings. Perhaps prettier than before, I’m not sure, but definitely a lot thinner. And something strange about her, as if the fire of that raw beauty that made me so insanely attracted to her had suddenly gone out. Something missing, that’s how I would put it. She looked dazed, half-asleep. I felt as if I were looking at some creature that had just risen from the dead, some being from some other reality that hadn’t fully made it into ours. I tried to convince myself that the girl of my dreams and this stranger were the same person, but something faltered in me. I went to give her a hug, see if the physical contact would thaw things a bit, but she brusquely cut me off, and I felt horrible, mistaken, ridiculous, out of my element. Later, she told me of the sudden and miraculous turn of events that had led to her freedom, which I supposed had a lot to do with this new mood between us. This woman has just come back from the underworld, I told myself, so it was natural that our world would still be a little strange to her. And what had been her first impression of me? Couldn’t have been much better. I must have seemed just like any other guy, no longer donning the writing teacher mantle, instead wearing a threadbare leather vest and boots, which were white because I had bought them in a thrift store and that was the only color available, but which aside from being white were also bulky, as if they were made for an astronaut to walk on the moon, not to mention the ugly red mark on my forehead because my helmet was one size too small. Some motorcyclists take off their helmets, tidy up their hair, and look great in a matter of minutes. I am not one of them. When I take off my helmet, I look sopped and disoriented, like a plucked chicken. The first thing María Paz asked me was if I had received her manuscript. And I said I had no idea what she was talking about. What manuscript? A very long one, she told me, and it had taken her days and days to write it while she was still in Manninpox. She was horribly disappointed when she realized I didn’t even know about it. It was clear she had put everything she had into writing her story, and that the manuscript had been lost was like a blow to the gut, one more loss among so many others. I felt like an idiot consoling her, assuring her we could find it, could find out what that woman from Staten Island who was supposed to have sent it to me did with it.