Shortly after I hung up with Thomas, Pluto, one of a handful of homeless people who lived in tents and garbage bags near the mouth of the tunnel, appeared at my bench carrying a sack of laundry, which he washed in a First Avenue high-rise during the shifts of a particular doorman who believed he lived there. He sat down gloomily and opened a paper bag containing eight beers from an obscure micro brewery. He offered me one, but I declined. The beers were expensive, and Pluto needed them.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Man accosted me in the laundry room,” he said. “Says, I’ve got my sneaking suspicions you don’t actually live here. I say back, Sir, I do my best to abide with dignity amidst more countervailing circumstances than you can shake a stick at. Should a man be punished for this? He says, Count of ten, I’m calling security. Had to pull out my whites before they were fully dry.”
“Jerk,” I said.
“That and more, baby,” he said, gulping his beer so the Adam’s apple rolled like a die in his throat. “That and more.”
Pluto was a dark-skinned black man in his forties, I guessed, whose taut, striving physique seemed the very personification of human effort. I had never known a homeless person—the notion would have seemed ludicrous before the accident—yet I was impressed by Pluto’s resourcefulness. Each morning at dawn, he used a handmade rope harness to lower himself from the rail of the concrete embankment into the East River, where he bathed vigorously in its icy waters and shaved before a mirror shard he’d epoxied to the embankment wall. He dressed impeccably, pressing his clothes with bricks heated over fire; read several newspapers each day, rented computer time at Kinko’s when he could afford it, and on garbage days combed the Upper East Side wearing yellow gloves and a face mask, searching out products by Kiehls and Polo (his favorites), along with vitamins and antibiotics whose “best used by” dates had passed. He begged outside certain buildings, Citicorp being his favorite, and carried handmade business cards—rectangles of white paper with his E-mail address printed on them—should anyone wish to expand the relationship of donor to beggar into that of employer to employee. Yet such mammoth effort did it require for Pluto to maintain his clean, sweet-smelling, healthy and well-informed demeanor that no time remained in the day for him to put it to any real use; he longed to improve his life, but could only remain in a perpetual state of readiness. The beers, which he drank at night, ate up most of his cash.
“Speaking of the unpleasantries humans are capable of,” he said, “you had a nasty look talking on your phone just this minute. Who’s the lemon made you pucker up?”
In the spirit of my new life, a life in which I answered questions straightforwardly and at length, I launched into a description of Ordinary People, presuming, of course, that Pluto would be mystified. After six or seven words, he cut me off. “You’re part of that circus?” he cried. “Why you hide something so critical all this while?”
“How do you know about it?”
“Never mind how I know; I’ve got myself a lane on that information highway. Now tell me where you’re at with this thing. Tell me everything you know. Fill my ears.”
After a minute or so of description, Pluto leapt to his feet, dropped to one knee on the concrete before me and gazed beseechingly into my eyes. Not for the first time, I saw his shadow self, angrier, more despairing and also more hopeful than his surface—a childish version of the rest of him. “Charlotte Swenson,” he said. “There’s a favor you must do for Pluto.”
I thought he was going to ask for sex. He usually did, eventually.
“Find out if they’ve got a homeless person yet,” he said. “They’re gonna need one. Homelessness is a part of life.”
“I’ll—”
“Wait, here’s what you tell them: You’ve got a spotless homeless guy knows this city belly up and belly down, you tell them he dresses well, he does everything he can to improve himself, reading, expanding his vocabulary, you tell them he does all this with no money, just a tent and a flashlight and a little oxygen he gets for free here at his summer residence.”
“I’ll—”
“Wait. You tell ’em I’ve been pushed, I’ve been pulled, stabbed, shot, I’ve cooled my heels in jail many a time, I’ve been kicked around by every Tom Dick Harry John and Julie here in this damn city and a few other ones, too, but they can’t stop me. I cannot be stopped. I will not be denied.”
“I’ll—”
“You tell them despite a multitude of discouragements that would’ve stamped the spirit on any normal man into grit by now, I’m living in a state of absolute faith—I believe in the stars, the sun, the planets, the Milky Way, the American Dream, God the Father, I believe it all, cross my heart. Every day when the sun rises I say, This is the day, hallelujah. But the higher powers got to give me some encouragement pretty damn soon, or a man’s belief naturally starts to erode.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said. “Maybe he’ll be interested.”
“You tell it right, he will be,” Pluto said, resuming his seat and removing one of his handwritten business cards. “Tell him he can reach me directly there.”
It was almost sundown, and I stood to go. “I don’t want to get locked in,” I said.
“Stay with me, baby,” Pluto said. “Just this night.”
“In a tent? Please.”
“Then take me upstairs in that diamond-studded castle where you live.”
“I can’t.”
“You can,” he said. “You must. I look up there and I see you having your shower before bedtime … what you got, tiles in there? I’m seeing tiles. I’ve got visions of you and those white tiles, and it hurts. You’re making Pluto hurt, I hope you know.”
“Maybe someday,” I said, not wanting to nurture the fantasy by telling him that my shower tiles were actually blue. “But not today.”
“It’s because I’m black. It’s because I’m homeless. You think I’ve got dirt on me somewhere.”
“You’re cleaner than I am, Pluto,” I said. “I’m just not interested in sex.” And this was true. In my new life, I didn’t have sex. I just thought about it.
“Hell with sex, prettygirl, I just want the use of that shower!” Pluto cried. “Hot water splashing against those white tiles, oh, Lord protect my sweet soul.” He shuddered. “I’m just saying, Miss Charlotte Swenson,” he called after me as I made my way to the overpass, “try not to flatter yourself so very, very much.”
27
The next time I saw Z, I got near enough to reach for the spot where I’d seen the wire inside his shirt. There was nothing this time. Just the spokes of his ribs and a hard stomach. It was the kind of hardness that can mean a few things. Devoted gym attendance. Subsistence living.
He put his hand over mine and held it to his chest. “Where did it go?” I shouted. We were in a club. For a change.
He shook his head. His heartbeat jumped against my hand. He had a hungry face. Dark-eyed, sharp-featured. A hungry, empty stomach. I pulled my hand away.
“Who could possibly care,” I said, “what’s going on here?”
“Everyone cares,” he said, in his accent. “This is America.”
“This?” I gestured at the room. The booths. The dancers. “This has nothing to do with America. We’re all in here hiding from it.”
He watched me. He’d been watching me for weeks. I’d felt the watching before I realized he was the source.
“Are you a spy?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Like you.”
I laughed, uneasy. Mitch and Hassam were across the room. Z had come to them two months before with a business proposal. Now they were inseparable.
“Seriously,” I said, moving closer, into his smell. Pepper, menthol. A not unpleasant smell, but strange. Strong. “What are you doing here?”
He smiled. Sipped his tea. He took in the scene. I tried to do the same, but I couldn’t see it. I’d been looking for too many years.
He said, “I’m watching the nightmare.?
??
29
I made my way from the club to the street. He was waiting. I invited him to my apartment for a drink. He suggested we walk. “I enjoy walking when the city is empty,” he said.
It was June, rain drying on the streets. “Chicago,” I said, when he asked where I came from.
“Chi. Ca. Go.” Moving the word in his mouth.
“The Chicago area.”
“Chicago.” He said it easily now.
“Outside Chicago,” I said. “About ninety miles west.”
“Is America there? Ninety miles west of Chicago?”
“Oh, yes.”
By the time we reached my building, I was sweating. It was 4:30 a.m. The doorman smiled at us. I think he’d actually forgotten that the man beside me was always a different man.
We rode the elevator in silence.
I took a brief shower, certain that Z would be riffling through my things. But when I emerged, head in towel, he was standing on my balcony. I joined him there. Desire showed its naked, greedy face.
Z’s eyes never shut. Not as we kissed, standing on my balcony, not after we moved to the couch and lay down, my hands on his bare chest and refugee’s stomach. His musculature was spare, military. Professional.
By then I’d been watching shadow selves for many years. They’d rescued me from boredom, from sadness. From tables full of rich, awful people. They’d given depth to the shallow, dimensions to the simpleminded. Mystery to the blatant. They were my own secret project. But Z knew about them, too. He was looking for mine.
A spy. Like me.
In my bedroom I kept the lights off, thinking now he would have to give it up (no light!). The colors of Roosevelt Island floated on his eyeballs. He hardly blinked. We eyed each other with a pressure that was like a shove. After a while I got angry. Fuck you, I thought. But there was no backing down, not until he did. We’re enemies. This came to me right in the middle of fucking. We’ll kill each other one day.
When I woke, the sun had bullied its way over Roosevelt Island and raided my bedroom. Z was gone. The sheets were pulled tight around me, tight as a hospital bed. Already the night was slipping from my mind. My lousy memory to the rescue.
31
I worked. Lingerie. Standing against a rolled color paper backdrop, resting my hand on a cube. Two men and a woman crouched below my groin, pinning the underwear to grip my inner thighs. I worried about my smell. The very fact of being alive felt tasteless. Look at this, I said, mentally. To him. And then I felt better.
Better than better. Interested.
Shooting, I wore a sweetly absent smile. A lingerie smile. It ached on my face like something heavy I’d been carrying for miles. “Turn left, not so much, back at me just a little … yes! Yes!” It could have been any day from the past ten years.
But I felt different, just slightly. The other model was one of the high school girls who come to New York in the summers. Her face was so fresh. So unmarked. She looked like a prototype.
Different. Just slightly. Look at this. And this. Watch the nightmare.
I perched on a stool in the unisex dressing room. I was fluffing out my hair. Two male models in jockey shorts pelted each other with sock balls. Eye job? I wondered, looking at the older one. Excitement cracked through me. I’d been discovered: someone had come for me, bringing with him a draft of something distinctly alien. Unrecognizable. But familiar, too.
He was the strange dark life I had made for myself, in human form. As if I’d invented him.
The offices of Extra/Ordinary.com encompassed an entire floor of an old factory building just off Union Square. Apart from the exposed viscera of heating and plumbing ducts, their main design feature was poured concrete. I had never seen so much concrete in my life: floors, ceilings, walls, concrete glazed and buffed, burnished and roughed, resembling, at various times in various lights, marble, alabaster, stucco, clay, fresco, paint, dirt and (creepily) human flesh.
Thomas Keene waltzed Irene and me through a brisk tour of the premises: a white sail splayed across a conference room wall as a projection screen; a small cafeteria serving organic food and juice made from prairie grass. Irene drifted behind, indignant at having been prised from her anonymous cocoon, skulking behind her hair when Thomas introduced us to members of his staff as if she dreaded to be recognized in an S&M dungeon.
Bearing mugs of Kona coffee, we retired to Thomas’s spacious office, where he joined us on a gaggle of chicly utilitarian chairs set around a black disk of coffee table. Through the canted factory windows came a chop of laughter and voices from Union Square.
“So,” Thomas said, and slapped his small, rather delicate hands against his haunches. He wore a midnight-blue jacket, camouflage pants and the same high-top Converse shoes he’d worn before. But these details had been subsumed by a mysterious new authority, as if Thomas had come to believe he actually was the person he had merely yearned to be two months ago. The fat, anxious shadow self was nowhere to be seen.
He sprang to what I guessed was a desk (black and sleek like the coffee table, only larger), seized the only object on it—an orange manila envelope—and sat back down. He waited for Irene to look at him. “This is very good.”
“Tell Charlotte,” she said. “I’m just the amanuensis.”
But Thomas continued to gaze at Irene without so much as a glance in my direction. “What you’ve managed to do,” he said, sliding a sheaf of papers from the envelope and fanning through them admiringly, “you’ve created this overwhelming sense of a life totally misspent, a person so completely benighted that every decision she makes is wrong.”
I hardly listened. I was staring at the chunk of pages in Thomas’s hand. There must have been a hundred of them—more! I tried to connect this wedge of paper to the sparse notes I’d seen Irene taking in my apartment; one small notebook in two whole months, and it wasn’t even full. I’d urged her to embellish, true. But the number of pages confounded me.
“There’s this deep sense of her life being moribund, you know, just bankrupt, almost waiting to be cast off, and then bam! Finito. When it goes, we’re almost glad for her.”
Irene had pushed aside her hair and seemed to be listening. I turned to Thomas. “You keep mentioning ‘her,’” I interjected. “Who are you talking about?’”
They both stared at me, Irene’s eyes bugging a little. “You, Charlotte,” she said carefully, with a pointed, highly communicative stare that I took to mean, Stop making trouble. To Thomas I said affably, “Why not say ‘you,’ then, since I’m sitting right here?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Habit from creative writing class. So anyway”—back to Irene—“I’m over the moon. You’ve got so much here, I love all the childhood stuff, I love what a little rebel she—whoops, you—were. The dreams are fantastic, I love how those geese come up again and again. But I was especially tickled by the Hopes/Aspirations category. ‘The mirrored room’—like, what is that? But we get it. We get it without getting it. And the dog stuff is absolutely priceless.”
Geese? Dog?
“Good,” Irene said cautiously. As a show of good faith, I added, “I begged Irene to put that in about the dog—I knew it would add something.”
“It does,” Thomas said. “It shows that she can care for another living creature, which I’m not sure we’d know otherwise. And that’s important, because we don’t have to love her, but we do have to like her, or at least be able to tolerate her. I mean,” he shifted in his chair, avoiding my eyes, “you.”
There was a pause.
“So. Here’s where we are,” Thomas said, like a newscaster switching from genocide to sports. “We’re absolutely going to buy this, it’s just a question of price.”
Irene and I exchanged sharp, hopeful glances.
“In fact,” he went on, “the plan right now is to launch in September with a handful of Ordinaries and Extraordinaries that we think have the best prospects, media-wise. I’d like you two—if you’re willing—to be part of th
at inaugural group.”
Irene and I mashed our feet together between our chicly utilitarian chairs.
“Now, what that means is, you’ll have to move quickly to finish up these materials. So to add a little incentive and buy some more of your time, I’m offering you a bonus of ten grand when you hand me a finished draft.”
“On top of our last option payment?” I asked.
“Correct, on top of that.” He surveyed our faces, taking in what surely were unmistakable signs of jubilation. “Now. What do I want.” Thomas swept to his feet and paced his poured-concrete floor (black and sparkling, like asphalt), as if the sheer intensity of his desires made them impossible to discuss while seated. “This background is great, like I said, but as an Extraordinary, the next phase is the most important for you: action. The accident itself and what happens next.” He was speaking to Irene.
“I’m—we’re—working on that,” she said.
“A few pointers. Number one: Drama. Excitement. I want fireballs rolling through the cornstalks. Lots of bright, rich color—find the beauty in it. Write it as one long narrative, and we’ll use what we need. Then for the hospital part, the facial reconstruction, lots of medical detail. Remember, authenticity is the beginning and the end of this product. Start with the ambulance, the siren, the rain, wheeling her in … ‘We don’t know if she’s going to make it, nurse.’ That kind of thing. I’m not saying make anything up”—he raised his hands, fending off any such suggestion—“I’m saying find the drama, find the beauty, find the tension and give it to us. You may feel like you’re making it more contrived, but it’s the opposite. Think about the Parthenon.”