He uses his right hand, and runs his fingertips lightly, gently over her brow, her cheekbones, her chin, her nose, and her lips.
— You’re beautiful, he says. I thought so.
— Come on, Mr. Forrest.
— You are, he says. I wish I could draw you.
They are still walking toward Eighth Avenue, and stop under the marquee of the movie house.
— But you live alone, he says. How come?
— Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not as beautiful as you think. Guys are… you know.
— Yeah, I know. Are you lonely?
— Sometimes, she says.
Forrest thinks: That means all the time.
— Don’t let it get to you, he says. It’s part of the deal, especially in this goddamned city.
He turns to go back to the Chelsea. She holds the crook of his arm. Then he stops again.
— How bad was it? he says. The killings, I mean.
— Pretty bad, she says. If New York One has it right.
— Both of them shot?
— No. Stabbed.
— Oh, God.
He pauses, feels tears welling in his ruined eyes. He flashes on Cynthia Harding’s smooth skin, her delicate neck.
— I’m so sorry, Mr. Forrest, Lucy says, squeezing his arm. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.
— No, no. Don’t apologize. Please.
— But I—
— It’s not you, Lucy. It’s her. And the son of a bitch who did it to her.
Camus senses that something is wrong. He nuzzles Forrest’s leg, pulls gently on the leash. And leads him home.
3:50 a.m. Freddie Wheeler. His apartment, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
He sits barefoot in a bathrobe, leaning back in the chair, staring at the blank screen. He has checked the news bulletins online, and they are alive with the killing of Cynthia Harding and Mary Lou Watson. He wants to write, and can’t. He knows nothing about Mary Lou Watson. She doesn’t even have a Facebook page, f’ fuck’s sake. But neither does Cynthia Harding. He has never spoken with her, but he does know her. Rich bitch with a press agent. Her name in the papers, the columns, fund-raising for the library, a Brooke Astor knockoff. Never gives interviews. Didn’t even know that books are over, that words on paper are over, that nobody goes to the fucking library in the age of Google. Still, why kill her? Why slice her up? Nobody deserves that…
— Stop, he says out loud.
Céline would laugh at you, you mushy airheaded sentimentalist! What makes you think Cynthia Harding was not just another New York hustler, chiseling her piece from the charities, lying on her taxes, and always nasty with the help? What makes you think she didn’t deserve it? For Chrissakes, she was the girlfriend of that son of a bitch Briscoe. That should have been enough motive, right?
And laughs, thinking: Oh, my Céline: I’ve been doing this too long.
He stands up and stretches. He places a hand on the window frame and stares across the street at the converted four-story tenements, with their black metal chimneys rising from the rooftops like hooded night watchmen. Water drips from cornices. Fire escapes cover the facades… a kind of iron calligraphy… cluttered with dead flowerpots… and one soaked denim shirt that has been there for months. A few lights burn in yellow rectangles behind drawn shades… still awake, or living in fear. He senses the city beyond the corniced rooftops… the sleepless… block after block of loveless imperfect fortresses that have lasted now for a century. So many people are awake… like the rats within the walls. The lucky ones are fucking… risking everything… even their lives. The rest are plotting… scheming… seething.
The way I do.
The way Céline did.
Even Céline needed sleep, he thinks. I must sleep now… be ready to celebrate. In a few hours… must raise a fist in the air… and curse Briscoe… and proclaim the end of the World.
3:50 a.m. Malik Shahid. Sixth Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn.
He is stretched across the backseat of the car, thinking that all we have is the past. The long-ago past. Medina in the seventh century. The immediate past. Two days ago. An hour ago. The blue Toyota is about eight years old, with a rusting scar on the hood. Definitely not a car worth stealing, either for resale or joyriding. It smells too of cigarette smoke and stale Chinese food. The filthy perfume of corruption. All the way from Sunset Park, Malik had been careful, never speeding, never trying to beat a red light. On Fourth Avenue, he drove all the way in the center lane. Looking casual. Middle-class. Yeah. Some graduate student from CUNY. Yeah. That’s me. Even when a police car eased past him and made a right on 9th Street. He didn’t play the radio, didn’t want to hear news bulletins on 1010 WINS. No weather report. The rain stopped. The sky gray.
He drove past Jamal’s street, went three more blocks, and turned on 3rd Street toward the Gowanus Canal. Pulled over beside a shuttered clothing factory, just past a loading bay. Turned off lights and engine. He pocketed the key, left by some drunken asshole. He wasn’t worried about the license plate. Nobody would report this heap of shit stolen. Waited, battling sleep, exhaustion eating his flesh. Alert for cruising patrol cars. Or anyone else who might spot him. Then he climbed into the backseat. The floor littered with beer cans mixed with a child’s plastic earthmover toy and a scuffed pair of women’s shoes. He opened a window on the right side, about a quarter inch, to allow air to enter. And stretched out to rest. He did not truly sleep.
Sleep would have to wait until he entered Jamal’s house on 6th Street, three blocks to the south. Jamal, his closest friend in the years after his conversion, Jamal, who traveled with him to Philadelphia, to Buffalo, to Canada, to all the stops in what they both called the Network. He was my brother then, the older brother I never had. His father was a doctor in Philadelphia, maybe still alive, practicing. Making money off sick black folks. Whites too. After September 11, Jamal was convinced that jihad was the only way. He and Malik started collecting the things they needed. A few guns. Powder. Accelerants. Bomb stuff. Getting ready for a rising.
Even after Jamal married an unbeliever, even after his father helped him buy the Brooklyn house, he still believed that day was coming, the moment when Allah’s punishing wind would blow again through America. Malik believed too.
Then Jamal went on the haj. And when Jamal came back, he called Malik and said: Malcolm was right, brother. Malik was sure he knew what Jamal meant. Malcolm came back from making his own first haj believing that Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslim cult was a bunch of shit. Pure Islam, Jamal said, was all that mattered. Malik agreed. But Jamal said that pure Islam didn’t necessarily include jihad. Their friendship started drying up. Jamal’s marriage helped it happen. They stayed in touch for a while. But it wasn’t the same.
After services at the mosque in Cobble Hill, even the imam, that timid man, asked them to stay away, insisting that suicide was against the Quran, that if you kill yourself in some action it is haraam and you cannot enter Paradise. Later that afternoon, walking in Brooklyn, Malik ranted to Jamal, shouting that the imam was a mushrig, a Muslim who betrays other Muslims. He should be killed. Jamal disagreed, softly, politely, a consoling arm upon Malik’s shoulders, but Malik raised his voice even higher and they went their separate ways. Malik traveled different roads. Longing for Iraq. Longing for Pakistan. Longing for Tora Bora. For training. For sacrifice. And never going. Finding Glorious Burress instead.
Now Jamal is a designer, a graphic artist, who uses his talent to sell the worthless shit that corrupts the world, even the Muslim world. His infidel whore wife won’t allow Malik into their house. They have a child, now about four years old, and the wife is too busy for visitors. Or so Jamal said once when Malik called from Denver. “You’re my brother, Jamal,” Malik said. “I miss you, man.” Jamal chuckled and said, “Yes, but I’m my little girl’s father and my wife’s husband.”