I met Edgar in the park near the Armory. He owned an ugly dog back then, something he’d rescued, and the mutt dragged himself around Dexter Field with the other dogs at the end of the workday. I was sitting on the swing set—no real kids ever used it—and watched the beauty with which Edgar threw the mutt a stick. He was a tall, broad man with a very neat trim of dark hair, the tattoo of a tentacle or a vine reaching out from under his collar and up the side of his neck. He flapped his Carhartt coat open and closed when he talked with the others. He was very expressive, and the cluster of people laughed whenever he joined them. He looked like any other twenty-something day laborer, but later, from the shadows across the street, I saw him step out of his house in tight black pants and a fierce trench with a fur collar, swinging an actual cane around his arm and singing—loud—some kind of bachata; he was probably the most attractive man I’d ever seen.
He was the sort of man who had deep, destroying affairs, and I loved hearing about them, my head against his chest, and after a while we both started to suspect that the best part of the affairs was talking about them afterward, together, under the oblique streetlight, on the mattress, in the dark—with the stories, the violence, the kisses, the breaking glass, the running, the crying, the begging. I was not at all surprised when he told me what his uncle did to him as a boy. I think I knew this the first moment I saw him in his Carhartt and work boots making people laugh in the park. Ours was a deep fidelity and a complete exception to our otherwise brutalizing relationships—his, in their number, mine, in their absence. Because I loved him, I hated his pederast of an uncle. One day I told him that I wanted to find his uncle and do to him what my Mémé had done to her long-ago lover Claude. I told him what I would do with the knife.
“Ah,” he sighed, “my darling. You can’t. Somebody already had the pleasure, when he was in prison for something else.”
I imagined this, and felt relieved that the man was gone from the world, but also disappointed.
“Too bad,” I said. “Don’t you wish you could have watched?”
*
It did not take us long to get around to Professor K——, and for me to pour out the sad story I had never uttered to anyone. After that, all we had to do was formulate the terms of restitution. Edgar really had nothing—less than nothing—to lose. As for me, I’d been paralyzed for nearly four years, estranged from my family, my architectural dreams reduced to breaking into the Armory to sit in its great, leaking hall. I was an expert on this building—I could have told you where the structure needed maintenance and where the steel trusses would first collapse—but I knew nobody would ever ask me what I thought about this or anything else.
We caught up with him in the late afternoon of an astonishing autumn. He was leaving his office, and I was right to assume his attachment to a regular schedule would be unchanged four years later. He was, naturally, on his way home to dinner with his wife. Edgar came up and slipped his arm companionably through the professor’s, and I did the same. Professor K—— was tall, but Edgar was taller, and had about fifty pounds on him. Edgar smiled winningly as I’d seen him do so many times, so many people in awe of him physically, and him just having the time of his life, knowing it all leads to death—even pleasure. The professor’s expression, of course, was one of confusion. We walked together, arm in arm, like chums. The professor looked from Edgar to me, and back to Edgar, then me.
“How are you?” I asked him.
“He’s great,” said Edgar.
“He’d have to be, on a day like this,” I said, whistling. “What a stunner.”
“What are you doing?” the professor whispered.
“Yes siree, he’s feeling great,” Edgar continued. “He’s blessed with so much. A high-class job. Summers off. A loving wife.”
Professor K——’s expression clouded. He pulled back on our arms, but of course we did not give him any slack.
“Our car is just over there,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s not far.”
“He doesn’t think it’s far,” said Edgar. “He’s happy to walk. On a day like this. He knows how lucky he is. And look at his shoes. Comfortable. European.”
“Viennese,” I said.
“He doesn’t look Vietnamese,” said Edgar.
“Oh poo,” I said.
“You cannot,” said the professor. “You cannot—”
Edgar opened the door to his Charger, arm still hooked through Professor K——’s, whose mouth was opening and closing in disbelief.
“We can’t?” Edgar smiled at me tenderly. “What was Obama’s slogan, honey?”
I smiled at Edgar. We were going to heal ourselves. “Yes we can.”
*
Plans had been laid and abandoned for the Armory building numerous times. Given up by the National Guard due to upkeep, it functioned, for a time, as a soundstage for a couple Hollywood movies. In 2004, a proposed bond issue to finance renovation was placed on the ballot; it did not pass. Standing inside of it, feeling the dank, perpetually wet air, one realizes that it will never be renovated because there is something wrong about it, something dark and un-American. It brings to mind torture. It reminds me in design of the Stasi building in Stuttgart, a building on which I’d written a paper for—who else?—Professor K——.