Since my clothes had been taken by the movers, I began to dress in Carter’s, which fit me well enough: his selvedge denim jeans, his soft cotton shirts, work boots I padded with two pairs of socks so they didn’t slip. I packed some of his clothes into a small backpack along with a few toiletries and some other useful items from his room—a little hunting knife, a pocket flashlight, forcing myself out of my prostration to prepare for what I knew would eventually happen. I locked my bike to a railing at the other end of the block, so I wouldn’t be left without transport. Then I took the walnut box of records and moved it to a locker in a nearby storage unit. The varnished wood was slick in my sweaty hands as I walked to the storage facility, an old industrial building with bricked-up windows and primary-colored signage facing the street. I focused on the need to be careful, to be precise in each step, to avoid obstacles, objects on the ground or uneven paving slabs. Technically this was theft, but I was the only person who understood the significance of Carter’s collection and I felt this gave me some kind of moral right of guardianship. Though the records were worth thousands of dollars, I had no interest in their market value. They were a vital clue to what was happening to us, what I had begun to think of as a jinx, a curse that had put Carter in the hospital and was grinding my own life to powder. If Cornelius took those records, I would never be able to save his brother. It was imperative to keep them under my control. I zipped the storage unit key into a small pocket in the backpack. Every time I went to get groceries (this was the only reason I left Carter’s room at all during those days) I took the backpack with me. When Corny’s men finally broke in and changed the locks, leaving me outside on the street, I was ready.
As I was trying to fit my key in the door, two men got out of a car and began walking towards me. I ran, but they didn’t follow. I was on my own. A bike, a few clothes. The records, though I had nothing to play them on.
After that, waiting became my life. Waiting outside the hospital where Carter was being kept, waiting outside Cornelius’s office. Waiting on the sidewalk outside Leonie’s building, in the basement bar with the fights playing on the bulbous black-and-white TV. I sat on a bench in Tompkins Square. I hovered on the corner near the studio. I slept in various places. It was summer: you could put a camping mat or some cardboard down on the sidewalk and no one would bother you, as long as you picked a quiet spot.
I stood on the sidewalk opposite Leonie’s building and waited for her to come out. I waited outside her building, standing on the sidewalk. Two hours the first day, three the second, until my feet hurt and my bladder was swollen full.
At last she came out. So quick, it would have been easy to miss her. The doorman helped her into a town car, which immediately pulled away. I got on my bike and followed the big black Lincoln uptown through heavy traffic. Past Houston it pulled away, disappearing up Tenth Avenue. I stepped on the pedals, skirting potholes and bumping over the lips of those giant metal slabs that utility companies throw down when they’re excavating the road. I was streaming with sweat by the time I spotted the car in Chelsea, parked on a block lined with art galleries. I could see Leonie herself, waiting on the curb in the heat, tenanting a small patch of shade and smoking a cigarette. I leaned on the handlebars as I watched her, trying to gulp enough air into my lungs to slow my racing heart. I could smell the hot stink of my unwashed body, the telltale scent of the outsider. A second car pulled up and a man got out. I saw the wavy boyish hair, a pair of dark glasses pushed up into it like a headband. Marc. So Marc was still in the picture.
A white-walled former warehouse with a sealed concrete floor. Quickly past the woman at the desk, too preoccupied with her email to look up. The cavern contained a single row of vast paintings, monuments of banality, wallpaper patterns stenciled in metal-flake car paint and fields of dots that on closer inspection turned out to be candy. I didn’t dare get very close to Leonie and Marc. I didn’t need to. I had my recorder, my binaurals. The mics in my ears could pick up her voice.
—It’s very impressive.
Marc said he’d been offered another from the same series, almost identical. He wasn’t sure the work would hold its value. She told him she thought it was good. Challenging, yes, but some of the artist’s best work. He was a friend of hers, in fact. I recognized the name, the bearded loudmouth who’d insulted her at dinner.
As they left, they walked straight past me, as if I wasn’t there. I think Leonie genuinely didn’t see me, but I had the sense that something more was at work, that my ordinary insubstantiality had intensified. I picked up a short conversation on the sidewalk. Marc making a half-hearted promise to call Leonie, her telling him he’d better, trying to sound casual and sassy. You better, she said, pointing pistol fingers at him, a self-conscious gesture that she held for a moment, then withdrew. You better call. He drove off and left her on the sidewalk.
Silence. The phone echoing in the high-ceilinged gallery, sound waves bouncing off the great big shiny surfaces of the art.
I stepped forward, ready to say please Leonie. I stepped forward in the gallery, on the sidewalk outside the gallery. Please Leonie, let me explain. The ringing phone, the shiny paintings. But she got back into her own car and it pulled away, leaving me alone in my sweat and stink. After that I drifted through the city on foot, recording. That was the summer I drifted through the city. Did I already say that? Everything I saw had a subtle but unmistakable doubleness. Each pace was reminiscent of some previous pace, not just because I knew the streets well and had walked them before, though this was true, but because I’d already taken that particular pace. My present had somehow gone before me and was already irrevocably in my past. All the sounds I could hear, slightly amplified and somehow picked out or defined, were no more than echoes, their presence freakish, their availability to me as exotic as a radio signal from a long-ago war.
Each moment, as I lived it, had already been used up. I could not connect things together. They happened to me, they had already happened to me. The helix that spans from birth to death, the unbroken thread of habit and progress that makes a person a person, a self whole and entire, had become as discontinuous and insubstantial as a chain of smoke rings.
SO THEN IT WAS EVENING and I was cycling down Avenue A, my heart racing, the street treacherous and provisional under my tires. Before or after I saw Leonie and Marc? I could not have said. He crossed in front of me, the old phantom, running as fast as he could into Tompkins Square, chased by a gang of punk kids.
I dropped my bike and ran after them, swerving past trash and piles of building rubble. Up ahead I saw him fall, his black coat flapping in a momentary gesture of surrender. He curled up as they swarmed him, kicking, punching, beating him down. As I ran up, they scattered, a quick flurry that slowed into a saunter with insolent speed. They didn’t come back for me, just loped away laughing and high-fiving each other. They had patches on their denim jackets: Savage Skulls. I looked down at JumpJim, who lay on the ground groaning and cursing.
—Little fuckers. Snot-nosed bastards.