“And when I heard that you would be made a ward of the state, that’s when I decided to play the part of your long-lost uncle.”
“You had pictures! Family photographs …”
“Lifted ’em from your house and made copies. That was no problem. Creating the paper trail, now, that was a challenge. The favours I had to call in! The arms I had to twist! Expensive, too. The signatures! But in the end the authorities bought it. I was your long-lost uncle Max, and as your nearest living relative I was granted temporary custody. Under supervision of the state. Eventually they were satisfied that I was looking after you properly, and-”
Owen leapt up from his chair. “You stole me!”
“No, lad. No. Sit down. I wanted to look after you. I wanted to do something to make up for what I’d done. Please, sit down.”
“You stole me. Just like you steal everything else in your life.”
“It was partly selfish, I grant you. I was a man of a certain age, I was alone, and I needed someone to love. And there you were. Love is, after all, a selfish sort of giving, don’t you think?”
“You stole me. Just like you steal your identities, your jewels, your cars, your money. But I’m not an object, Max. I’m not a thing. Oh, God, I don’t believe this.”
Max got heavily to his feet, made a tentative move toward him, but Owen stepped back.
“I’m sorry, boy. I’m sorry for what I did long ago, and for what it did to your parents and to you. If I could undo it, I would. I would, so help me God. But I can’t, and I couldn’t, and so I did what seemed like the next best thing.”
Owen started toward the kitchen, stopped. He started toward his bedroom, and stopped again. His mind wasn’t working. He wanted to get away but didn’t even seem to know how. His limbs lacked the skill.
Max came toward him-big, lumbering Max, clumsy as a bear.
“It doesn’t change anything else, boy. To me, you could not be closer if you were fashioned from my own right arm. You are my boy, my lad, my prince, and I-”
Owen finally got his feet to work. He fled the apartment and punched the elevator button. Unable to stand still for even a minute, he ran down four flights of stairs and burst out of a side exit into the blinding grit of First A venue.
TWENTY-SIX
Owen didn’t go home until late that night. He slipped quietly into his bedroom, packed a suitcase, and checked into a cheap hotel in midtown. He could have stayed with a school friend, but he didn’t want to see or talk to anyone; he just wanted to be alone.
He spent the next few days wandering from Starbucks to Starbucks, bookstore to bookstore. He sat in Union Square feeding the squirrels, he visited the Central Park Zoo, he read magazines in the public library. He wasn’t thinking; he wasn’t able to think. His mind had seized up, locked itself around what Max had told him. Owen wasn’t even sure if he was angry; he didn’t know what he was feeling.
He would sit in the cool dark of the movie theatres taking in nothing of what was happening onscreen. His mind would not let go. And when he came out, the world seemed drained of colour, overexposed. The crowds, the noise, the traffic swirled around him and he hardly knew where he was.
He tried to separate the two essential facts that Max had revealed to him and weigh them one at a time. First, how bad was it that Max was not really his uncle? Did it alter the fact that he had raised him? Did it render everything else about their relationship false and empty?
And then the other, much worse: that Max had been the cause of his parents’ deaths. His actions had led to all that tearing metal and twisted steel that had killed them both instantly. But obviously Max hadn’t intended that outcome. He was just a criminal on the run, in a blind panic, heedless of everything except the spectre of prison looming before him.
Still Owen stayed away. After three days he moved into the dorm at Juilliard.
He felt a lot better once classes started. It was exciting to embark on a new life, and he found himself enthralled by all the books on the syllabus: critical works, texts on acting, playwrights he had never heard of. And he was fascinated by the other people in his class. They too had all earned raves for their performances in their drama club, and a lot of them had worked in theatre camps and small summer theatres while Owen had been busy robbing Republicans.
Owen was intimidated by some of them, they were so talented. While others, well, you had to wonder how they had ever passed the audition. The stage set his group was using consisted of leftovers from the previous semester, a living room suite that might have been new in the mid-seventies, cat-clawed and much stained. Halfway through the second week of school the instructor, Phil Major, was centre stage, analyzing the performance of a student named Jason who had mumbled his way through a Sam Shepard monologue. Then it was McKenzie’s turn.
McKenzie was a knockout, with shapely cheekbones and wide-set eyes that made her look both innocent and wise. Everyone in her class wanted to recognize some speck of talent in such beauty, but when Phil gave her the go-ahead, she fell hard onto the couch and, in a manoeuvre straight out of World Wrestling Entertainment, pitched forward onto her knees, where she proceeded to claw at the carpet. She shrieked her lines at such volume that Owen covered his ears.
Phil clapped his hands twice, two sharp reports.
“Okay, McKenzie, thank you. Thank you,” he said, in a silky tone that betrayed nothing of the horror he must have felt. “Well, that was certainly less restrained than Jason. But you have to keep in mind, this scene occurs early in the play, and if you start at that level of intensity you’re going to have nowhere to go for later scenes. Remember, acting is never about losing control, even if your character is losing control. Okay. That’s all we have time for today. Same time, same place, Thursday.”
The students filed out of the auditorium, quieter than usual, subdued by the McKenzie Chernobyl.
“Owen, you heading to the caf?” It was Bobby Jaye who spoke. Bobby was all blond dreadlocks, an earnest Midwesterner with a skateboard under his arm.
“No, I’m gonna take a walk. I need a breather.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Bobby looked around conspiratorially. “Man, that McKenzie really goes to eleven. I thought we were gonna have to call an ambulance.”
“She may have given us a little too much.”
“Oh, really, you think?”
Owen headed up Broadway to the Acropolis, one of the last old-style diners on the Upper West Side. Tuesday at four in the afternoon, the place was full of chattering high school students. Owen sat at the counter and ordered a Coke. The TV above the glassware was tuned to NY1, sound off, the mayor gassing on about something. Owen pulled out a used paperback copy of Burn This. He turned to Pale’s opening speech, a fiendishly intricate rant that he was hoping to memorize by Thursday.
But all he could think about was Max. Here he was at Juilliard, immersed in theatre arts-it was ridiculous not to be discussing it all with Max. He pulled out his cellphone and set it on the counter beside the book, considering.
Dr. Abe Pfeffernan, a scholarly-looking man dressed in hospital scrubs, waited calmly in line with the other customers of the Chase branch at Sixty-eighth and Madison. He had a beaky nose, a slightly mournful expression, and a full head of curly salt-and-pepper hair bisected by the surgical mask he had pushed up there and forgotten.
The doctor chatted amiably with the lady behind him. They agreed that one of the problems with the prevalence of ATM machines was that when you eventually did require the services of a human teller, you faced a hideous lineup. And so slow. Invariably the person in front of you was there to refinance a mortgage or to exchange Ugandan shillings for Swiss francs; no one went to a teller for a simple withdrawal.