He looks up through the ceiling grill, watching as the light leaves the sky. He runs his hands over his body and then punches a fist into the tunnel wall and does it again, and each time he can feel a crack in his hands. He keeps on thumping until there is blood on both fists and then he mixes the blood together and keeps on thumping until he is exhausted — he even slaps at it with his elbows — and then he stumbles into the blackest blackness and there is not a sound in the tunnel.
Clarence Nathan can feel the pain in his hands but he doesn’t care; he wishes he could murder them, annihilate them, suicide them; they form no meaningful connection to his wrists — more than anything he wants to get rid of his hands.
Returning to where he saw the pigeon flying, the cantankerous dark all around him, he bumps into a pillar. With all his remembered gymnastics, he climbs the pillar and finds himself on a narrow catwalk and walks along it, welcoming the pain in his hands — he doesn’t even feel it anymore, it is part of him, organic — and he is high up in the tunnel, all spectacular balance still in him; there is no sign of anything or anyone, it is cold and quiet and otherworldly, and he is amazed to find that the walkway leads to an elevated room, and he opens his hands to the dark room and falls there and curls up into himself and he doesn’t sleep.
* * *
The thing about it is, Angie, a man needs time to bury his hands. You listening? I could go bury my hand right here if I wanted to. Just watch me. See how it disappears. Right down here in the sand. Both of them. Angie. Angela. Where the goddamn hell you gone, anyway? Angie? See how they disappear.
chapter 15. our resurrections aren’t what they used to be
He wakes alone on the Coney Island sand, high tide just five feet from him, pieces of plastic and filthy foam carried on the waves, all unaccustomed water noise around him, an anemic wolfhound sniffing at his feet. The dog runs off when he stirs. His toes are freezing in his boots, and he remembers giving Angela his socks. Moving to rub the sand from his hair, he is shocked at its shortness. He stands and shakes the sand from his clothes and the blankets, reaches in his pocket for his sunglasses, but they have been smashed, cracked into two pieces. He tries to balance the glasses on his ears but they fall off and he leaves them in the sand and looks out to sea, sensing a shift in the weather, morning redness far out on the horizon. It is strange to him how quickly the sun rises, the one abrupt moment before it moves into lethargy, its arc of slowness, its daily grind.
He turns his back and walks from the beach.
Up on the boardwalk there are some early joggers. A few straggling lovers hung over from nightclubs. A Russian Jew with a black hat and long beard and ringlets. A man with a silver cart is selling coffee and doughnuts.
Reaching inside his overcoat pocket, he still has, from Faraday’s funeral, a five-dollar bill with pins through it. He buys coffee and a bagel, walks a short way along the boardwalk, coughs and spits. More blood in his phlegm than ever before. He feels the heat of the coffee sear through him, and his stomach has shrunken so much he can eat only half the bagel. He tosses the rest to the wolfhound, which is still down below on the sand. The wolfhound sniffs at the half bagel and then turns and lopes away. In the distance, he hears the rumble of trains on the elevated track. He counts out a dollar twenty-five cents and makes his way toward the station. Slush at the edge of the sidewalk. The palms of his hands are scabbed over now from where he cut them.
He tips the rim of his wool hat and allows two old ladies to go past him.
“Good morning, ladies,” he says, and they ignore him, scuttle on.
He vaults the turnstile and nobody stops him. In the train he sits in the second carriage from the front, in the middle of the row of seats, away from the subway map. The train is full of well-dressed suits and skirts, one woman powdering her face. He notices that all the seats are taken except those around him, and he knows how badly he must smell, and for a moment he thinks about standing up and giving his seat to a woman — any woman — and then going to stand between the two carriages to let the wind drive the scent of him away. But instead he stretches out on the seat, curls his body, puts his hands in under his head, and rocks with the rhythm of the D-train. He has emptied himself of history, and everything Clarence Nathan Walker has ever known in his life stands between here and a tunnel.
* * *
“And ol’ Sean Power, Lord save his soul, ol’ Power said to me once that God just went ahead and let one go, God went ahead and farted. But I don’t like to think on it that way, son, even though it’s funny and it makes me laugh. Me, I think on it as something else altogether. And sometimes at night, see, I can still feel my whole self rising up through that river.”
* * *
He waits at the gate, in the sharp silence of a last snowfall, picks up a clump of snow and scrubs his face, feels refreshed, vital, alert. He has spent the morning at the bus station — fifteen dollars one way, they told him. In his pocket he has twenty dollars. Bottles and cans. Redemption money.
There is a single set of footprints in the snow, and he knows they belong to Angela. He places his boots in the prints and lengthens them.
Removing both his overcoats, Clarence Nathan squeezes his way through the gate, stands on the metal platform, and catches his breath as he puts the coats back on. Along the tunnel the brilliant blue light shafts slip in and out of the darkness. The flakes of snow make their long familiar journeys through the light — their spin, their fall, their gathering. He moves down the steps and walks quickly from light shaft to light shaft, enjoying the brief rage of brightness.
A shorn man wrapped in the darkest of coats, the inside lining flapping down beyond his thighs, he looks thin and sculpted by some terrible human degradation, his construction boots wrapped in tape, his purple hat tight down over his ears, motes of dust in the light shaft crashing off him at all angles as if the light itself mightn’t even want him. Yet he moves with a strange fluidity, a sureness, balancing on the edge of a rail as he goes. Clarence Nathan has revisited himself, arrived full circle, each shadow of himself leading to the next, which is just another shadow in the fun-house darkness. He shivers when he sees a small rat moving at the side of the tracks as if it might accompany him the rest of his life. Picking up a handful of pebbles, he flings them at the rat and walks on.
Thirty-nine days of snow and ice and ferocious cold. His feet so numb there is hardly any pain. Already the stubble beginning to darken his cheeks. But he moves quickly, with intent, solitary and sure.
At Elijah’s place he stops and puts his ear to the door and is not surprised by the sound of radio music drifting underneath the giggles of Angela. With his eyes closed, he can imagine Elijah and the thump of love moving through his body, even the smashed shoulder and the shattered kneecap, and the tender way Elijah might be preparing to strike her pure and hard in the low part of her stomach. Clarence Nathan notices that the door has been fixed and that Elijah has appropriated Faraday’s toilet seat. For a moment a smile flickers across his lips, until he thinks of Castor and the smile is gone, and he wants to burst in upon them, but he doesn’t and he knows he won’t; he never will. He will leave them to their own brutalities and all the winters yet to come.