Just last week he’d said: My favorite thing about you is when you look at yourself in the mirror like a teenager. She’d said: My favorite thing about you is your hands.
Just last month: holding each other’s shoulders, jumping around in a circle, like crazy monkeys, around the apartment. His very own show! His very own show!
Now: I don’t want to see you again.
In dreams people repeat the worst things over and over, as if on a loop. I don’t want to see you again. Again again again. Never again. In a dream you can cry endlessly and not even know you’re crying. You can cry so loudly and not even know you’re crying. You can shake your hands like insane fans and a dreamy, mothy nurse will escort you into a hallway. She will hold down your arms and hug you so tightly that you will be forced to stop shaking, like Arlene had. Perhaps this is the only possible thing that could comfort you: being forced to be still. Eventually, after she has held you long enough, she will guide you down the dream hallway, deposit you out onto the street.
There will be no giant parking lot with a car for you to get into, no green hedges or row of pine trees, no mother. Nothing physical to separate the sick from the city, the end of the world from the rest of it. This is trauma in a city: a layering of one tragic space onto another, one surreal picture jutting right up into the next. It has been only however long it had been, and yet you can already tell, as you step out into the night, that everything in the city has completely changed.
It was late. Lucy didn’t know how late, but she knew that it was late. She had learned to read the telltale signs of lateness from her almost-morning walks home from the Eagle: shut grates and alley cats; circles of glowing eyes in the parks, the eyes of people who had spent all day sleeping and would spend all night getting high. Garbage trucks — those nocturnal, mechanical armadillos — roamed, creaked, and banged. Homeless men lurched from their concrete beds. Sirens flew down the streets and then up into the colander of the sky, through the holes of the stars. The moon was somewhere, but she wasn’t sure where.
You were supposed to be scared in these streets, at this hour, but Lucy never had been. The things that scared her — oblivion, wildfires, aloneness — were not hazards here like they were out in the woods, and she had the general feeling that if anything bad happened to her, someone would save her from it. The city, with its million arms and million lights, would scoop her up, absorb her, rock her to sleep in its madness. But now she felt scared for a new reason: the world of the night did not have Raul Engales in it.
How could it be late if he was not here with her? He was lateness; everything late belonged to him. The doorway on Bleecker he’d shoved her into for a kiss, only to hear a homeless man growl underneath them. The vending machine he had kicked because he felt like it, only to have a Coke fall out: another of the universe’s many gifts, meant just for him. Midnight Coca-Cola! he had yelled. Coca-Cola Midnight! The drawing of a chicken with a human’s head he had done with his fat permanent marker on the wooden barricade on Prince Street: still there now. R & K Bakery, where they found each other on that July evening, when someone had been murdered on the roof of the Met, where they had hugged, pressed their bodies together, then fed each other cinnamon rolls until morning, when they emerged into the sticky city with sticky fingers.
As she moved through the lateness, bleary-eyed and rejected and hopeless, she noticed something strange. Cones of white light, shifting in half-moons over the ground and around the corners of buildings. She saw when she got closer that the lights were emerging from hunched, phantasmal forms that scooted and floated through the dark streets. They were sparse at first, and then as she turned onto Prince, they were many.
When she was close enough for the lights to illuminate their faces, she realized that the zombie-like forms were women, in loose-fitting pants or housedresses, their hair in knots on top of their heads, or down and long, thinning at the ends. When she had studied enough of them, she saw that their eyes were like her own mother’s eyes: deep with knowing, maternally frantic, heavy, and alert. They were calling a name.
Jacob! They yelled in husky night-mother voices. Jacob! Jacob! Jacob!
The name rang through the dream of the night as if the dream were a valley, ricocheting off its sky-scraping mountains.
On the corner of Prince and Broadway, one of the women came toward her. Lucy tried to avoid her eyes but then found herself caught in their motherly net. The woman, wearing an outfit made entirely of peach linen, dug a flashlight out of a huge straw bag, handed it gently to Lucy.
“Someone’s lost,” she said, with more than a little desperation. “We thank you for your help.”
She handed Lucy a stack of white fliers and a plastic box of pushpins. When she disappeared down Broome, Lucy wanted desperately to call her back. Those lines forking from her eyes. Those linen clothes; that good face. She needed her. She needed a mother, any mother, more than anything else in the world.
She thought of her own mother on the edge of the bed, reading to her from a chapter book. Her mother who always stopped reading the story at the best part, telling her it was time for bed. She would scream and kick. She wanted to see how it would end! She wanted to know the fate of the main character, who was a girl, just like her. She couldn’t wait, and yet she had to. In vain, she’d stay up all night, trying to teach herself to read the big words on the page. But she was too small. And the world of the book was too big.
MISSING CHILD, the flier read, in large block letters. JACOB REY. Last seen at Broadway and Lafayette at 8:00 A.M. Male. Hispanic. Six years old. 40 inches. Dark hair, brown eyes. Wearing a red shirt and his pilot’s cap, blue sneakers with fluorescent stripes, carrying a blue cloth backpack with dinosaurs imprinted. Persons having any information, please call 212-555-4545. $10,000 Reward.
The picture above the text was of a small dark boy with wobbly eyes and a tentative half smile. A bowl of messy hair and a softly rounded nose: both handsome and silly-looking at the same time, like someone who had never given a thought to danger.
She imagined the young boy, unable to defend himself against the huge world, wandering the streets that could seem so cruel if you did not know your place in them. She thought of Engales’s mean eyes. Of his rocky voice, telling her never to come back. She thought of the bloody bandage of his arm and his bloody shirt. Then she remembered the folded paper she had taken from that shirt, stuffed in her own pocket. She pulled it from her pocket now, opened it.
It was him. It was Jacob Rey. Raul had been carrying around a picture of this very same lost boy.
Lucy felt her heart roar in the way it only could in dreams. Fate was at work here, she could feel it. The loss of the boy and the loss of the hand would now be sewn up together into the same chunk of her mind and her heart, linked by the fact of their tragedies and by the dream that encompassed them. Linked by a shirt pocket and a Tuesday in September: the fates of the boy and the man, her own fate right in between, colored by the moon’s scary glare.
She began to sense that the air had changed. It held the manic buzz of tragedy, as if its particles were being rung like alarms. It was the same buzz from the night of the Met murder. The same buzz she had felt through the screen of her parents’ TV when she had watched the footage from the ’77 blackout. It was both eerie and exciting, frenzied and more alive than ever. It was during a tragedy, Lucy thought right then, that a woman who hated you hugged you around the neck. That a group of people who didn’t know one another searched together all through the night. That mothers roamed the streets in packs, swooshing their warm lights. It was during a tragedy, she tried to tell herself, that fate would intervene in the form of love. Something would save her. And she would save something.