Merciless hot
Satan machine
Glad down
One morning, late for work, Art grabbed his favorite cup out of the cupboard, poured himself some coffee, and choked at the first sip. There was a cigarette butt in it. Bruno was still asleep, or pretending to be, but Art imagined him laughing. When he got to the office, he e-mailed Inès and updated her on the situation. Her reply came almost instantly. He often behaves this way. Send him back if you want, she wrote languidly. You don’t have to keep him.
“Of course I don’t have to keep him,” Art said out loud. Samantha heard him — the company had an open-plan floor space — and cocked an eyebrow. He shook his head at her and typed back, Never mind. He knew Inès didn’t count on him to fix her son, or, for that matter, anything at all. Neither did Bruno. If Art said no to the high school plan, Bruno would shrug and get on the plane back to Paris. Art glanced around the office, filled with shiny, twentysomething heads. Nobody expected to stay here long, and everybody openly surfed for other jobs. The horizon of expectations was low. If he left today, he’d be replaced tomorrow. Drilling his fingers against his desk, Art thought, Enough.
When he got back to the apartment, Bruno wasn’t home. It was a suffocating summer night and the AC units labored mightily in the windows. Art stood in front of one, lifting his shirt to expose his stomach to the cool air. Above the machine’s huffing wind he could hear the familiar sounds of his block: traffic, construction, the beagle’s harassing wail.
He wandered into Bruno’s room, his old office now a scattershot landscape of flung T-shirts and discarded jeans. The boy’s suitcase lay open on the floor, its mouth disgorging even more clothes. The air smelled of teenage funk and dirty laundry. Art sat down at his desk. During the months of chemo, he’d spent most of his time on the futon in here, daydreaming of spectacular lives he might one day lead: he’d write a book about his ordeal; get back into political journalism; ask out Samantha, who always flirted with him even though she was so young; and soon he’d be on talk shows and in the New York Times. He’d lie on his back, cupping his groin as if he could heal it with the palm of his hand. It had been curiously peaceful, all standard concerns suspended in a liquid solution of ifs: if I get better, if I get through this … Strangely, when it all ended and he got his health back, the daydreaming and ifs evaporated. He was better but somehow lesser. He stopped imagining anything other than the life he had.
It was eleven o’clock and Bruno wasn’t home. Although he knew the kid was sophisticated, Art was still freaked. He looked around for the notebook, hoping he might find some clue, but Bruno had evidently taken it with him. On the desk was Art’s laptop. He’d seen Bruno checking Facebook from time to time, but in general he didn’t seem to use the computer much. Now he turned it on and checked the browser history, finding it had been cleared, as if the boy had covered his tracks.
He began to pace around the apartment, fidgeting. He made some coffee, then went through the mail and opened his bills. His mouth dropped when he saw that his credit-card balance was nearly two thousand dollars — charges for music sites, tons of iTunes, and what looked like Internet porn.
His head throbbing, he went back into the office and checked the laptop again. In a folder labeled School he found a long list of obviously noneducational files, and when he clicked on one of the porn videos it brought up images so disturbing that he had to close his eyes, though of course he opened them again right away. “Fifteen,” he said. “Jesus.” The video concluded and prompted him to visit its home site, where he was invited to “Rate this video! Share your comments here!” Beneath this, a notice instructed him to type the following words as a security measure:
Mice imp
Those word pairs from Bruno’s notebook — he was collecting anti-spam phrases. Art couldn’t believe a porn site, of all places, was trying to discourage spam. On the screen, two women were gyrating around in front of a man holding a gun. Someone was moaning, someone else was shrieking, both out of sync with the video. Staring at it, Art didn’t even hear Bruno come in.
He smelled smoke and waved it away, only belatedly realizing it meant the boy was home. He clicked off the porn, blushing violently, and turned around to see him busily stuffing the clothes on the floor into his duffel bag. There was a cut on his forehead and another on his arm, just above the wide leather cuff he wore on his wrist.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Did you miss me?” Bruno said, smirking.
Art reached up and grabbed his arm, hard. “Where were you?”
The boy shrugged.
“Stop shrugging!”
Bruno reached for his cigarettes, but Art knocked the pack out of his hand. And then Bruno burst into tears, his mouth contorted, the explanation coming out in rapid, babbling French that Art couldn’t understand.
“Hey,” Art said. “Hey.” He tried to hug the kid but Bruno pushed him away, again grabbing for a cigarette.
Eventually, after he smoked three of them and had a shot of bourbon, the story brokenly emerged. Bruno told it sitting at the kitchen table, his voice soft, his eyes not meeting Art’s: he’d gone to the apartment of a woman who’d advertised on Craigslist. But her husband was there, and he wanted to watch. When Bruno started for the door, the man came after him with a knife.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Art said.
“No,” Bruno said, calmer now, though his fingers were still trembling, with some dark substance, whether dirt or blood, rimming the nails.
“What the hell are you doing answering ads on Craigslist? You could’ve been killed.”
Bruno looked around the room vaguely. “There is nothing else to do here.”
“You’re in New York City and the only thing you can find to do is meet strangers for sex? Jesus Christ, who are you? What happened to taking in a goddamn Broadway show?”
The eyes that met his were blank, dark. Unreachable. No wonder Inès wanted him out of her hair, Art thought, no wonder she was willing to send him halfway around the world to a father he hardly knew. This boy — there was something off in him, more than just teenage mischief, some wiring gone amok.
“Like I said, Bruno, you could have been killed.”
“Sure,” he answered. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it. I am leaving. My mother will buy me the ticket.”
“No,” Art said.
The kid looked at him, surprised — as Art himself was. But here he was, sure of what he was doing. He had one ball left: enough for whatever. Enough for this.
“No,” he said. “You stay.”
Fortune-Telling
The kung pao chicken was what kept me going back night after night. That and the hot and sour soup. Otherwise the Chinese restaurant had nothing going for it. You know those places where there’re loads of Chinese people ordering from a separate menu, and you gesture that you want what they’re having and suddenly you’re eating steamed dumplings and buns with mysterious, delicious fillings and side dishes of spicy, tender broccoli? This was not one of those places. In countless visits I never saw a single Chinese customer. In fact only Mr. Lu, who cooked the food, was Chinese. His wife, Stacy, who took the orders, was blond and hailed from Plano, Texas. Mr. Lu churned out egg rolls and fried rice and kung pao chicken at an amazing pace; you didn’t often see him, but you could hear him screaming at Stacy when she went back into the kitchen with the orders. It always sounded like he was outraged by what people had selected, but Stacy told me it was just because all the years of clattering pots and pans had damaged his hearing.