They went to Chinatown. They went to the Jersey shore and ate harpooned swordfish, which it's tastier when the fish dies unstrangled by a net, with olive oil and capers, the last great fish thing on the planet.
"I have to tell you first thing. I don't have the what-do-you-call completely established."
"The lineage."
"The lineage. I don't have the lineage all the way."
He told the caller some things about the ball. He said he would make a long story short. Then he made it long. He entertained the man, why not? And he saw it coming even as he did the bits and routines, delivered the reliable lines. Clarice would have to rent a hospital bed for the apartment, high sides so he wouldn't tumble to the floor. Strangers would come to wash his genitals, immigrants from countries on the travel channel, they had lives of their own that he could not imagine a single minute of. He would forget how to eat, how to say simple words. His body would lie there trying to put together the needed elements to take a breath. An oxygen tube in his nose and bananas on the windowsill, he hates them when they're spotted and soft. Clarice speaking slowly, putting a cool cloth to his naked head. All right, I'm fine, all right. Carl in his pressed white shorts and tube socks, a stockbroker disguised as a boy
"Do we want to talk about price?" said the voice.
The word for water is water but he wouldn't be able to say it. The body forgets the basic things. He talked on the phone to Phoenix and looked at his windbreaker hanging on a chair.
They went to the Jersey shore. They made love, they made salads. This was when the terms were in the dictionary.
That night he ate half a cantaloupe with grapes clustered in the scooped-out part. This is how they sold it in the supermarket, packed in clinging wrap.
5
When people tell rat stories, the rat is always tremendous. It's a drag-belly rat the size of a cat because this is a satisfying rhyme. There was a fair amount of rat lore in these streets when Nick Shay was growing up. Not that rats were frequently seen. They were heard in the walls and down the yards, indelible half fictions, running across rooftops in the moon. Enormous rats with rat-brown fur. There were rats in sewers and demolition sites and coal bins, a rustling in the flung garbage of empty lots.
He got out of a taxi near the building where his mother lived. The building was not here thirty, forty years ago, a large brown structure, tall and broad and defined by a sense of fortification-fences and ramps, cameras angled from the brickwork.
This used to be a row of five-story buildings, tenements, and that's where he saw the rat, wet and dead, lying next to a coal pile on the sidewalk. He was nine or ten at the time and the incident came back to him, taxi easing from the curb, with a detailed directness. Just a dead rat but he could see it clearly, feeling a kind of doubleness, a shaped transparency, die-cut, that fit him to the moment. He remembered how he'd studied the limp body, feeling a grisly thrill to be so close, able to trace a faint pink line down the underside of the tail, and the rat was brown and gray and pink and white all together and separate but he was disappointed by its size-he would have to exaggerate the rat, put some heft and length in his story, some mouth drool and yellow eye.
There was a man in a plexiglas booth. Nick signed a register and was buzzed into the lobby, which was occupied by kids, small and smaller, playing, milling, their voices shrieky in the bare space. He took the elevator to twelve. The other rat was later, when he was in his twenties, also ordinary in size, your common Norway brown, but ordinary is big enough when you talk about rats.
Matt opened the door, his brother Matty, still looking a little boyish, short and blocky, cowlicked, with thick glasses and a fresh haircut and some gray, maybe, on top, that seemed extraneous. Midforties he would be. They hadn't seen each other in a few years and it was only an accident of timing that brought them together today.
They shook hands and exchanged the wry smile of adversaries who are enjoined from mauling each other by some inconvenience of context.
Nick said, "Where is she?"
They talked about their mother, about medications, doctors' appointments, not unusual matters, but there was a rigor in the older brother's questions, a particularity of interest and concern that amounted to a kind of challenge.
Matt said finally, "She's okay, she's good, she eats and sleeps normally. You want to know about her natural functions, you'll have to ask her yourself."
"You're staying over?"
"Two nights. You've totally forgotten what it's like, Nick. A night in the Bronx."
But Matty had long since filled out the small boy's sketchy torso, developed some mass in his upper body, a certain sturdiness of bearing.
Nick said, "I have to go to Jersey in the morning or I'd take her to the doctor myself."
"What's in Jersey? Chemical waste eating people's houses?"
"Personal business."
"How's Marian?"
"Fine, they're all fine."
They drank seltzer and took turns looking out the window. There was a picture window with a broad view west. El Bronx. People sat on lawn chairs on the roof of a motel nearby. Nick could tell these were local men and women who'd gained entry to the roof from an adjacent building, carrying their chairs and newspapers. He knew it was evidence of brisk improvisation, people extracting pleasure from the grudging streets, but it made him nervous, it was a breach, another opening, another local sign of instability and risk.
"I took her to the zoo," Matt said. "She has the zoo across the street but it's the first time in twenty years I could get her to go. Practically forced her out the door."
"You're on a mission."
"She says she has more animals on television than she can handle. I can't make her see the point of living breathing creatures."
"I'm getting her out of here," Nick said.
"Is that right?"
"To Phoenix. That's right. There's no reason anymore for her to be here."
"She has friends here. You know this."
"I know this? How many friends? What friends?"
"To Phoenix," Matt said.
"How many friends?"
"We haven't done a head count lately. But if she wanted to go, we'd take her gladly."
"You don't have room."
"We have room," Matt said.
"Listen to me. You don't have room. We have room. We also have climate."
"Climate."
"This is important at her age."
"Janet's a nurse. You want to make a contest out of it? Janet's a nurse."
"This is stupid."
"Of course it's stupid. This is why we're doing it," Matt said.
Nick was at the window again.
"Why would they put a motel in a place like this?"
"I don't know."
"It's a convenience, this motel, for sex and drugs. Because what else is it here for? Or homeless. A shelter for homeless people. They put them in motels now."
"She likes it here, Nick. It's her life, it's what she's used to. She has her church, her stores, all the familiar things. And the friends that are still alive. Ask her for a list."
"You don't know. I know. It's a convenience, this motel, for what they're doing."
Nick went into the kitchen and started opening cabinets. He inspected the area under the sink. Kids were riding tricycles in the hallway. He poured another seltzer and went into the living room. The bike bells sounded down the hall.
"How's Janet? Janet's all right?"
"She had a lump removed from under her arm."
"Did I know this?"
"It's okay. She's doing okay. The kids are okay."
"These lumps are everywhere. Everybody's looking for lumps."
"I read something in the paper not long ago. Made me think of you," Matt said. "Remember those machines they had in shoe stores? Tall consoles sort of like old radios, but with a slot down near the bottom."