“I hope you’ll find this story helpful,” the doctor says.
Acting contrite isn’t Hannah’s strong suit, but she tries to put some humility behind her words and says, “I’m sure I will. Thanks for filling me in, Doc.”
“You’re welcome,” Cheng says. “And I hope, should you learn anything more, you’ll not hesitate in relaying your findings to Little Asia.”
Hannah takes her palm from her ear, makes a fist, and futilely pummels the shared wall, as if this will lower the volume of the music.
“Since when is it necessary to say that, Doctor?”
There’s no response.
“I’ve always worked the split with you,” Hannah says, turning sideways away from the wall, her voice rising. “We’ve had an unspoken agreement. When have I not honored the deal?”
Finally Cheng says, “Our understanding has served us both.”
“I’ll bring you what I find,” Hannah says, suddenly wanting to hang up.
“I’m sure you will,” Cheng says. “But it would be better if I came to you—”
“Yeah, I understand. You don’t want me down Verlin Ave anymore—”
“You don’t understand, Hannah—”
She cuts him off and says, “Tell me something. You own part of this place, right? You own a piece of the Tribal Drum?”
He gives a wheezy laugh and says, “I’m simply a neighborhood doctor, Hannah—”
She interrupts again, “And I’m the Virgin Mary. Do yourself a favor and soundproof this dump.”
“I’ll check on you soon,” Cheng says, and then, after a beat of silence, he hangs up.
Hannah sits for a second with the phone still pressed against her head. A waiter approaches carrying a fresh pot of steaming tea atop a red plastic tray. His neck is weighed down with a dozen ropes of gold chain. His hair blown dry into a perfectly curved helmet that covers any sign of his ears.
“Can I get you something?” he yells over the music.
Hannah can actually feel the pulse of it through the wall. She slides out of the booth and faces him and without thinking, she says, “I’ve been stood up.”
He puts on an exaggerated frown as if he finds this impossible to believe. He gestures down to the phone and says, “Why don’t you sit back down? I’ll bring you a Mai Tai and you can see who calls.”
Hannah stares at him, shakes her head, then moves for the exit, throwing her shoulder into the waiter’s arm as she passes, sending the boiled tea into the air, splashing a shower over the next booth of jabbering regulars.
PART THREE. SUNDAY
34
Flynn has no idea how to lose this edgy feeling that’s lodged in his stomach since he took the call from Shaw. But he’s convinced that attending the Todorov Memorial Parade down here in the Zone sure as hell won’t help. Unfortunately, Ronnie insisted, so now they’re shoulder-to-shoulder with the elite hip, trapped in a chic swarm roaming from display to event to performance down the length of Rimbaud Way.
It’s not that Fr. Todorov had any solid connection with the Canal Zone clique. Mainly, he liked to be seen eating in the restaurant of the month with the poet of the week. But the Canalites have this weird passion for parades, and any occasion is usually suitable for a petition to block off the main drag and form a swaying convoy of disparate and stylish contingents, each equipped with makeshift costumes and floats and their own P.A. system for spreading one more unique manifesto.
The bulk of the Canal Zone is made up of mammoth brick mills and factories, the earliest of which ran off the current of the Benchley River. A few of the small factories still operate, but for the most part, the backbone of Quinsigamond industry has fled heating costs and union wages and vanished to places like Arizona and Malaysia.
Fanned out beyond the old sweatshops are the tenements that housed the immigrant labor. Flynn thinks that maybe the most interesting piece of Quinsigamond history is the half-forgotten fact that the Yankee bosses were adamant about housing each ethnic group separately. So there was an Irish block and an Italian block, a French block and Polish block. The unspoken idea was that if these dissimilar workers didn’t learn each other’s language, they’d never be able to organize and turn their collective power against the owners. Though the plan failed, Flynn can see there was this awful brilliance to it, this mad social-scientist flair. Keep the peasants suspicious of each other and they’ll never notice their real enemy.
Generations later, those original mill-working families have battled their way up to middle class and beyond. The Yankee barons are long since dead. And the factories are the decayed remnants of an invisible war, settled by neither victory nor negotiation, but rather, simple and vicious obsolescence. The buildings are used as everything from theaters and warehouses and biker clubs to subdivided office spaces, a roller-skating rink, a bowling alley.
And the tenements for the workers are now tenements for the art crowd. The cheap rent and gritty ambience have pulled in bohemians from all over New England and they slouch up and down McJacob and Dupin and, especially, Rimbaud Way — the Zone within the Zone — day and night, looking for imagery, free coffee, semi-soft drugs, pseudo-safe sex, and bitingly hip conversation. There appear to be laws about dressing in black, avoiding the sunlight, suppressing visible emotion, and the proper use of hair products.
During an average day, the Canal Zone streets are crowded and busy. Today the place is a bobbing sea of skinny bodies. There are people everywhere and they’re all feeding off each other, communally crazed on this buzz running through the air, this shared conception that some major incident is about to take place. Flynn has never been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, but he’d bet this might be a close approximation. It’s like a spontaneous unorganized circus has gotten lost on the road and come to an unexpected stop in some outdoor museum of the middle industrial age. It’s like a ragtag carnival has mutated and grown to an unreasonable proportion.
This is their idea, Flynn thinks, of a memorial for a murder victim?
The idea down in the Zone seems to be to invert everything, toward the end of finding some other, hidden level of meaning. It’s as if all the residents have agreed that, no matter what else they might do to turn a coin or relieve the pressure, this is the real job, this hunt for codes and messages is the only genuine occupation. Their environment practically demands it. There’s so much input. There’s no way to avoid all the signals and symbols and markings that scream from every direction. They move through a constant sea of obscure bulletins, an ongoing blitz of never-quite-clear communiques. The graffiti alone is blinding. Every individual red brick in the Zone seems to be partially splashed with paint. The residents will tell you that no one ever sees the artist in the act. You simply walk down the street one day and notice a picture or a word or a series of words that wasn’t there before. Supposedly, there’s an acquired thrill in trying to discern different styles, in attempting to guess who created what.
Flynn looks down at the long side of the old Seward typewriter factory. The wall is covered, right up to the roof, thirty feet off the ground. He wonders if you flew over the Zone in a plane, would you find signs on the roof itself? The artwork is striking. There’s real talent down here, people with actual ability. Do they really prefer mill walls as their canvases? Is this the medium they most want to work in? He stares at the Seward and tries to take everything in: pictures of fire rings, photo-real crucifixes, naked bodies copulating, silver B-movie flying saucers, still lifes of orchids and small dead birds, a ram’s head, a pentagram. And then there are the words, sentence fragments mostly—