On the fourth evening his stomach was sore with famine and he began looking through the waste material at the back of the hospital for leftover food. He was seen by a doctor leaving for the night in his car who notified security and Cy was removed from the grounds with a stern warning. He walked several miles back to Sheepshead Bay with the soles of his feet thinning and blistering against the leather of his boots. It was a hot wet night in the streets of Brooklyn, and the humidity washed garbled phrases out of him that were slurred and pointless, the way the quicksand had loosened his tongue when he was a boy. There was a moment when he could not go on, from weariness and bitter sadness, and he sat down on a bench and held his stomach and his body cramped with sobs. An old woman walking past with her dog jabbed at him with her stick and in a hissing fit of conniption told him to go away. He kept moving, stopping only once more at an allnight store where he bought a quart of liquor. When he arrived home he drank it with determination and slept on a sheetless bed, he had not brought his washing down from the roof, not having been home since the morning of Grace’s attack, and now it was being rained wet again. Within an hour Señora Ubago had pinned a note on his door stating he was late with his rent.
In the morning he bought fresh boiled bagels from the bakery and fruit from the market, though by then his stomach resented the intrusion and he had to concentrate hard to resist being sick. He ate standing outside his building, gingerly, watching the living pass by, fearing the dead under their feet. On the way back to his room he paused next to Grace’s door and was suddenly horrified to think of the horse, unfed and unwatered, closed up in a tiny space. He had no idea where Maximus was, whether he had been left at the circus or not. The door was ajar very slightly and upon closer examination the wood around the lock was splintered and split. Evidently Claudia had had the same idea about the horse. Or some opportunistic felon, some nosy gumshoe, after hearing the news of her downfall, had taken the opportunity to burgle Grace while she was indisposed. He moved for the first time inside her apartment and it was like coming into the countryside. There were patches of hay in the corner and a warm barnyard smell enriched the air, the odour of livestock and rusk. Maximus had imprinted his character on her home as well as if he were a husband. Cy thought to himself again that it was simply implausible and impractical for her to have pulled off such a feat. And yet she had done it. A patchwork blanket was folded over the back of a chair, it was covered with coarse wiry horsehair and a few pieces of bridlery hung from a hat-stand, but there was no saddle to be found anywhere. The apartment was one of the smallest in the building and some nights Grace had kept the largest horse Cy had ever seen in it without the building manager’s knowledge. The old Jewess must surely have known! She must have known or suspected, or for ludicrous reasons agreed to it all. Though there was Grace in his mind’s eye, going to the trouble of putting sacking on the horse’s hooves as she led him back inside over the incriminating marble floor, asking for his cooperation to step high and quiet with her gypsy-blood whisper in his twitching ear. There she was, rugose and beautiful at once, arguing with strangers over any cause she saw fit, and giving up her body for a belief, or a move in a political game, or for nothing at all. It seemed such a stretch, so innately impossible when she was not here to prove it, but he had long ago given up on what was possible in life. In this city of a thousand impossibilities, the whole world could dream, with methods and strategies as appalling and wondrous as a war of angels. A trip to the bright white moon or to the green ocean floor was possible in Luna Park, buildings grown from magic beans were possible, eighty storeys high and more, Coney’s freaks were possible and Manhattan’s thronging, semi-harmonious crowds, the fine dance of people moving on sidewalks and between motor cars, all of it was possible. And love, love for a woman made of eyes was above all else possible.
As he looked around Grace became no less of an enigma. There were no tommy guns in cases, nor reams of money stashed in satchels to condemn her. Beside the quirks of evidence of her equestrian involvement the rest of the apartment was ordinary, like a stage set in a minimalist play. There were books stacked on an old table, he flipped one open and the print was in English. In a bowl were some apple cores, bitten through and turning brown. An empty sack of oats was peeled back on the wooden floor. In the kitchen the sink was plugged, filled a quarter full of water with straw floating in it, the smell of an animal’s thirst hanging just above the surface like a cloud of flies over a pond. The window was open and outside by a tree in the old courtyard was a pile of dry horseshit, and hanging from the window ledge, a bag that could be fixed to the animal’s hindquarters to catch its dirt. Nothing else but these few mean things told him of Grace, or gave him a leg-up into her life. She was as she came, self-contained and layered. She ate, slept, breathed.
He moved back towards the door and was about to leave when he noticed a strange artisan-looking object in the corner of the room on a bookcase. It was made of flat rectangular wooden slats stacked up on each other with fibres of paper in the very middle, like an old-fashioned press. There were four screws at the four corners of the contraption that bit firmly into the wood beneath them. He began to unscrew the bolts, a little at each corner in turn because the pulpy muscles of the press were keen to kilter out unevenly as it was opened. When the bolts were off he lifted out the boarding and between the centre paper was a pressed flower, so flat that it might have been paper itself if its brown-pink pigment against the white page had not distinguished it. It was a thing so frail that Cy dared not remove its ironed stamen and petals, seeming no more opaque and no more transparent than one layer of human skin from any race. He replaced the top of the press as best he could, it was a tricky fit and he was aware that the original positioning and frieze of the flower had been done with great care. Then he left and closed her door.
Upstairs he washed and shaved, put on a new pair of slacks and a clean blue shirt under his suspenders and he tied back his hair. He had looked like a vagrant for the last few days, like a wild dog rustling through rubbish and dirt with its nose. And he’d smelled like the drunks he had been hauling up from their own piss and blood and mistakes all his adult life. His mother had always said that a clean face and a pressed collar could get a ticket aboard a carriage to the city of London even if the change was wrong. Reeda Parks had never ridden a horse-drawn tram in Morecambe, let alone a train to the capital, but he thought of her philosophy tenderly as he paid for his ticket back to the hospital.
True enough his improved appearance opened the door for greater insight into Grace’s condition. The doctor, a short, greying, varicose man, shook his hand and described the injuries. It seemed she was still an undecided compound, not quite solid, not quite liquid, but something in between. Though her internal organs had been unscathed by the acid — if the shock of such a strong corrosive on her flesh was great, the alkali had been downright confusing — there were equations and proportions of damage to the skin which meant that this durable but delicate organ was presently working out of sync with the rest of the anatomy. And it could influence other organs. Such was the plexus fashion in which the human body relied upon each of its critical vessels and components for survival and harmony. At that moment Cy heard the voice of his mother again, trilling at the back of his head. One without the other we are made poorer, Cyril, remember that.