What sort of freedom? The freedom of not caring.
I am not blaming my mother. My mother did what she had to do; she was at the mercy of forces tracing their spindly route back through the usual multigenerational history of frustration and oppression. All the worst brutality begins across the threshold of home. But she didn’t lay a finger on me, not after I got bigger than she was, which didn’t take long.
And yet there I was in the front room. Days, I would watch the patients on their way into the MRI clinic. Frail people and strong people, people who’d been living with illness for years and people who seemed blindsided by its unannounced arrival. I saw people who’d never left the neighborhood, and were stamped with its stunting imprint, and people who obviously had recently arrived; bought one of the big houses on Colonial Road or Narrows Avenue and, having thus established a beachhead in their lives, thought they were all set for a long campaign. I saw anxious sons, daughters, wives, husbands on the sidewalk outside, smoking, pacing, talking on the phone. The place had a cheery sign; it strove for the mien of a drive-in oil change franchise. Mornings, I would watch the day care center. Nights, the saloon. I waited.
I was never a planner, but to wait is to plan, or it is itself a sort of plan. Actions move us swiftly into the irrevocable, but to wait keeps the irrevocable at a distance. I realize that this attitude defies conventional wisdom, but what had conventional wisdom ever done for me, other than to absorb me into its patterns and rationales (I embodied the cautionary tale)? To learn patience was to remove myself entirely from the story. I reassured myself: when it’s cold out, I’m warm. When it’s wet out, I’m dry. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I want to bathe, there’s hot water. These and similar needs met, the only other thing I needed was the window, and to wait. Who needed to act? I watched the actors; the day care, the bar, and the clinic embodied the entirety of life, framed in that window: in the mornings, they kicked and screamed, at night they behaved like fools, and during the day they came, pale and sweating and full of terror, out of the hammering confinement of the clinic.
Then one day Bobby appeared on the stairs, carrying a white box from the bakery tied with red and white twine. We embraced, we kissed, we sat. Bobby had come up in the world: he didn’t hesitate to tell me what my eyes already had. The jacket, the slacks, the loafers, the watch. The subtle haircut. That he would even know where to go to get his hair cut like that: would you? He’d come up in the world and now, he announced, he was in a position where he could do a favor or two for an old friend in need. In short: Michigan, and Manitou Sands. I left with him within the hour, leaving the unopened pastry box for my mother to remember me by.
I would have sworn that Bobby and I worked closely together, that we were close, had I been asked, but no one would have asked me, because the question would not have occurred to anyone. I was obviously a factotum. I had a title, I had clothes, both of which were intended to stir faint echoes of the title and clothes Bobby possessed, as my specific responsibilities were intended to stir the faint echo of the authority Bobby wielded. Certainly I was feared, but I was not respected, and never in my natural life was I able to tell the difference. I fetched things, stood off to one side, carried money, beat people with my hands and feet when asked. I would have been happy to spend my life that way. Each day, the same as the last. There was nothing beyond Michigan and Bobby: nothing bigger, nothing waiting, nothing to come, nothing to catch up with me. So it seemed.
Yet the present is always the secret encampment of unintended consequences. Sedate as a neutered tomcat, it never occurred to me to rue the day, as the saying has it. Yet to rue the day doesn’t begin to cover it. One would have to rue every day, every one that came before and every new one as it arrives and all those to come in anticipation. Only in death is there time to rue life as fully as life deserves. But I get ahead of myself.
OUR MONEY CAME from two streams. The original of the two was a laundry operation. Money from illegal sources was painstakingly changed into legal winnings. This took time, and patience, and it was not ideal, since the winnings were subject to taxation. Naturally, the government’s lawful share was found, on the scale of dreams, to be disproportionate. Whose dreams? What dreams? Dreams of capital flowing unfettered, unimpeded, from its dreamy sources to the parched and dreamy basins it filled and brought to blossom. The everyday dreams of people everywhere. Does taxation ever find a place in those dreams? Does even the most liberal of minds, in its uninhibited moments, dream of higher taxes? These are rhetorical questions. And there were other, unofficial tariffs; doubtless you can easily imagine all the ways in which various officials were induced to turn a somewhat myopic eye to our activities. It was Bobby’s job now to increase our margin. His solution was simple: he began to make money disappear during the minuscule interval when it has stopped existing. There is always an instant, as money changes hands, when it slips into limbo. It nearly always reappears, recognizable though slightly redefined — mostly in terms of whose property it has become — but its bardo is a moment of opportunity for those who know how to enter it. Why should Bobby and I have been afraid of the space between money’s death and rebirth? The sanctity of property rights, of generally accepted accounting principles? We’d killed people; laughed at the concept of the immortal soul. This was nothing. It was a coin trick.
Yet what I felt when I went into the cage was that it was I who made the money take form — I made gestures, I spoke words, and the money was suddenly there, body and blood. And with that miracle in my mind, I toted it back to New York, puffed up as any magician. To spend it, to steal it — that never entered my mind, not once. Not only because it would have been impossible for me to be disloyal to Bobby, but because it was pleasure enough to have created the money, to have brought it out of the shadows of its liminal existence. But Bobby didn’t see it this way. As far as he was concerned, the money was always money, as good as what it could buy. It belonged to no one, it belonged to luck, it passed into and out of various hands, and to put it in the hands of South Richmond Consultants, to call it theirs, suited Bobby, at first. Everyone was satisfied, even the Indians. Bobby’s suits, his car, his privileges at the hotel, improved, as did mine in their faint echo of his.