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"I think it's
time for a little drink."

And
after he had drunk and given the poor Chilean professor the sly squint of a
hunter, he began to sing again, if possible with even more brio. And then he
disappeared, swallowed up by the crater streaked with red or by the latrine
streaked with red, and Amalfitano was left alone and he didn't dare look down
the hole, which meant he had no choice but to wake.

 

3 THE PART ABOUT FATE

 

When did it all begin? he
thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The
nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept
coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it
all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also:
maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter,
as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also:
fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around
him, ghosts.

Quincy Williams was thirty when his mother died. A neighbor
called him at work.

"Honey,"
she said, "Edna's dead."

He
asked when she'd died. He heard the woman sobbing at the other end of the line,
and other voices, probably other women. He asked how. No one said anything and
he hung up. He dialed his mother's number.

"Who is
this?" he heard a woman say angrily.

He
thought: my mother is in hell. He hung up again. He called again. It was a
young woman.

"This is
Quincy, Edna Miller's son," he said.

There
was an exclamation he couldn't make out, and a moment later another woman came
to the phone. He asked to speak to the neighbor. She's in bed, the woman said,
she just had a heart attack,
Quincy
,
we're waiting for an ambulance to come and take her to the hospital. He didn't
dare ask about his mother. He heard a man's voice cursing. The man must be in
the hallway and his mother's door must be open. He put his hand to his forehead
and waited, without hanging up, for someone to explain what was going on. Two
women's voices scolded the man who had sworn. They spoke a man's name, but he
couldn't hear it clearly.

The
woman who was typing at the next desk asked whether something was wrong. He
raised his hand as if he was listening to something important and shook his
head. The woman went back to typing.
Quincy
waited awhile and hung up, put on the jacket that was hanging on the back of
his chair, and said he had to leave.

When he got to his mother's apartment, the only person
there was a fifteen-year-old girl who was sitting on the couch watching TV. She
got up when she saw him come in. She must have been six feet tall and she was
very thin. She was wearing jeans and over them a black dress with yellow
flowers, very loose, like a robe.

"Where is
she?" he asked.

"In the
bedroom," said the girl.

His mother was on the bed with her eyes closed, dressed as if to
go out. They'd even put lipstick on her. All she was missing was her shoes.
Quincy
stood for a time
in the doorway, looking at her feet: there were corns on her two big toes and
calluses on the soles of her feet, big calluses that must have hurt her. But he
remembered that his mother went to a podiatrist on

Lewis Street

, a Dr. Johnson, always the
same person, so they must not have bothered her too much after all. Then he
looked at her face: it seemed to have been carved out of wax.

"I'm
leaving," said the girl from the living room.

Quincy
came out of the bedroom and
tried to give her a twenty, but the girl said she didn't want money. He
insisted. Finally the girl took the bill and put it in the pocket of her jeans.
To do that she had to hitch her dress up to her hip. She looks like a nun,
thought
Quincy
,
or like she belongs to a dangerous cult. The girl gave him a piece of paper
where someone had written the phone number of a neighborhood funeral home.

"They'll
take care of everything," she said gravely.

"All
right," he said.

He asked about the
neighbor woman.

"She's
in the hospital," said the girl. "I think they're putting in a
pacemaker."

"A
pacemaker?"

"Yes,"
said the girl, "in her heart."

When
the girl left, Quincy thought that the people in the building and the
neighborhood had loved his mother, but they had loved his mother's neighbor,
whose face he couldn't remember clearly, even more.

He called the funeral home and talked to someone by the
name of Tremayne. He said he was Edna Miller's son. Tremayne consulted his
notes and expressed his condolences several times, until he found the paper he
was looking for. Then he put him on hold and transferred him to someone called
Lawrence
.
Lawrence
asked him what
kind of ceremony he wanted.

"Something
simple and intimate," said
Quincy
.
"Very simple, very intimate."

In
the end they agreed that his mother would be cremated, and the ceremony,
barring unforeseen circumstances, would take place the next evening, at the
funeral home, at seven. By seven forty-five it would all be over. He asked
whether it was possible to do it sooner. It wasn't. Then Mr. Lawrence
delicately approached the matter of payment. There was no problem.
Quincy
wanted to know
whether he should call the police or the hospital. No, said Mr. Lawrence, Miss
Holly already took care of that.
Quincy
asked himself who Miss Holly was and drew a blank.

"Miss Holly is
your late mother's neighbor," said Mr. Lawrence.

"That's
right," said
Quincy
.

For
a moment they were both silent, as if they were trying to remember or piece
together the faces of Edna Miller and her neighbor. Mr. Lawrence cleared his
throat. He asked whether
Quincy
knew what church his mother belonged to. He asked whether he himself had any
religious preferences.
Quincy
said his mother
belonged to the Christian
Church
of
Fallen Angels
. Or no,
maybe it had another name. He couldn't remember. You're right, said Mr.
Lawrence, it does have a different name, it's the Christian
Church
of
Angels Redeemed
.
That's the one, said
Quincy
.
And he also said he had no religious leanings. So long as it was a Christian
ceremony, that would be enough.

That night he slept on the couch in his mother's house. He
went into her room just once and had a glance at the body. The next day, first
thing in the morning, the people from the funeral home came and took her away.
He got up to let them in, gave them a check, and watched how they carried the
pine coffin down the stairs. Then he went back to sleep on the couch.

When
he woke up he thought he'd dreamed about a movie he'd seen the other day. But
everything was different. The characters were black, so the movie in the dream
was like a negative of the real movie. And different things happened, too. The
plot was the same, what happened was the same, but the ending was different or
at some moment things took an unexpected turn and became something completely
different. Most terrible of all, though, was that as he was dreaming he knew it
didn't necessarily have to be that way, he noticed the resemblance to the
movie, he thought he understood that both were based on the same premise, and
that if the movie he'd seen was the real movie, then the other one, the one he
had dreamed, might be a reasoned response, a reasoned critique, and not
necessarily a nightmare. All criticism is ultimately a nightmare, he thought as
he washed his face in the apartment where his mother's body no longer was.

He
also thought about what she would have said to him. Be a man and bear your
cross.

At work everybody called him Oscar Fate. When he came back
no one said anything to him. There was no reason for anyone to say anything. He
spent some time looking over his notes on Barry Seaman. The girl at the next
desk wasn't there. Then he locked his notes in a drawer and went out to eat. In
the elevator he ran into the editor of the magazine, who was with a fat young
woman who wrote about teen killers. They nodded to each other and went their
separate ways.

He
had French onion soup and an omelet at a good, cheap restaurant two blocks
away. He hadn't eaten anything since the day before and the food made him feel
better. When he'd paid and was about to leave, a man who worked for the sports
section called him over and offered to buy him a beer. As they were sitting
waiting at the bar, the man told him that the chief boxing correspondent had
died that morning outside
Chicago
.
Chief was
really an honorary term, since the dead man was the only
boxing correspondent they had.

"How did he
die?" asked Fate.

"Some
black guys from
Chicago
stabbed him to death," said the other man.

The
waiter set a hamburger on the bar. Fate finished his beer, clapped the man on
the shoulder, and said he had to go. When he got to the glass door he turned
around and contemplated the crowded restaurant and the back of the man from the
sports section and the people in pairs, gazing into each other's eyes as they
ate or talked, and the three waiters who were never still. Then he opened the
door and went out. He looked back into the restaurant, but with the glass in
between everything was different. He walked away.

"When
are you heading out, Oscar?" asked his editor.

"Tomorrow."

"You got
everything you need, are you set?"

"All
set," said Fate. "Everything's ready to go."

"That's
what I like to hear, son," said the boss. "Did you hear that Jimmy
Lowell got whacked?"

"I heard
something."

"It
was in
Paradise
City
,
near
Chicago
,"
said the boss. "They say Jimmy had a girl there. Some bitch twenty years
younger and married."

"How old was
Jimmy?" asked Fate without the least interest.

"He
must've been fifty-five or sixty," said the boss. "The police
arrested the girl's husband, but our man in
Chicago
says she was probably mixed up in it
too."

"Was
Jimmy a big guy? Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds?" asked Fate.

"No,
Jimmy wasn't big, and he didn't weigh two hundred and fifty neither. He was
five ten, maybe, maybe one seventy-five," said the boss.

"I
must be mixing him up with someone else," said Fate, "a big guy who
had lunch with Remy Burton sometimes. I used to see him in the elevator."

"No,"
said the boss, "Jimmy almost never came into the office. He stayed on the
road. He showed up here once a year tops. I think he lived in
Tampa
, he may not even have had a place, spent
his life in hotels and airports."

He showered and didn't shave. He listened to the messages
on the answering machine. He left the Barry Seaman file that he'd brought from
the office on the table. He put on clean clothes and went out. Since he still
had time, he went to his mother's apartment first. He noticed that something
there smelled bad. He went into the kitchen and when he didn't find anything
rotten he tied up the garbage bag and opened the window. Then he sat on the
couch and turned on the TV. On a shelf near the TV there were some videotapes.
For a few seconds he thought about checking them out, but he gave up the idea
almost as soon as it came to him. They had probably just been used to record
shows that his mother watched later, at night. He tried to think about
something pleasant. He tried to mentally run through all the things he had to
do. He couldn't. After sitting absolutely still for a while, he turned off the
TV, picked up the keys and the garbage bag, and left the apartment. Before he went
down the stairs he knocked at the neighbor's door. No one answered. Outside he
tossed the garbage bag into an overflowing Dumpster.

The ceremony was simple and businesslike. He signed a few papers.
He wrote another check. He accepted the condolences first of Mr. Tremayne, then
of Mr. Lawrence, who appeared at the end as Quincy was leaving with the urn
that held his mother's ashes. Was the service satisfactory? asked Mr. Lawrence.
During the ceremony, sitting at one end of the room, he saw the tall girl again.
She was dressed just as she had been before, in jeans and the black dress with
yellow flowers. He looked at her and tried to give her a friendly wave, but she
wasn't looking his way. The rest of the people there were strangers, although
they were mostly women, so he supposed they must be friends of his mother's. At
the end, two of them came up to him and spoke words he didn't understand, words
of consolation or rebuke. He went walking back to his mother's apartment. He
set the urn next to the videotapes and turned the TV back on. The apartment had
stopped smelling bad. The whole building was silent, as if no one was there, as
if everyone had gone out on urgent business. From the window he saw teenagers
playing and talking (or plotting) but doing the one thing on its own. In other
words, they would play for a minute, stop, gather, talk for a minute, and go
back to playing, and after that they'd stop and do the same thing over and over
again.