Authors: Chase Novak
But it’s far too late for that.
He walks across the unlit room, which he could navigate blindfolded. He presses his ear to the door. Waits. Listens.
“Mom?” he whispers. And hears in reply only silence. With a little more fear in his voice: “Dad?” Again, the silence. Is it the benign silence of emptiness or the silence of a beast waiting to strike? No matter how hard Adam presses his ear to his bedroom’s door, the silence persists.
With the gate out of the way, his next task is to open the window—a window that has not been open for as long as he can remember. His small hands clasp and yank the brass lifts on either side of the lower sash, but the window does not budge. His face is fiery; his slender fingers feel as if they are about the break. Adam steps back, his heart racing. He sees that the thick wooden frame encasing the window has been painted so that there is not even a crack of space between the window and the molding that holds it in place. Once he saw his father struggling to open a window that had been painted shut. His dad had hammered the heel of his hand up and down the window frame, breaking the paint’s seal, and then opened the window with no further trouble. But Adam does not dare bang away—such noise will surely bring his parents upstairs, if they are not already there, waiting.
Adam takes a series of deep breaths, telling himself,
You do this, you do this, you can.
He grabs the brass lifts, expels his breath with a strongman’s mighty huff, and to his great surprise the window opens with a long crackle.
There is no time to be proud or happy. Adam climbs out of the window and steadies himself on the windswept landing of the fire escape, reminding himself that if he looks down into the frozen, barren patch of backyard three stories below, he will surely fall. He takes a moment, waiting for his heart to slow down and for his breaths to come more easily.
I’m going to make it,
he tells himself.
A kind of iron gangplank connects the part of the fire escape he’s standing on to the landing beneath Alice’s window. He looks toward it and sees her peering nervously through the steel diamonds of the burglar gate. He’s pretty sure that the key that opened his gate will work on hers as well. It has to. It must.…
And if her window has been painted shut? He will open it. He has found a strength beyond what he knew, or even imagined. He has tapped into his will to survive.
The fire escape is slippery. It vibrates in the wind. It seems to sway when he moves; it wants to pull away from the bricks of the building. The rusted bolts attaching it to the side of the house chirp and squeak.
Slowly, Adam takes a step toward his sister, and another step. The metal groans beneath his feet, but as frightened as he is, there’s no turning back.
He looks out into the night, which is as unfamiliar to him as the terrain of some distant planet. He has seen it only in pictures and through his window, but now it strikes him as somehow more alive than he had ever imagined it. There is the sound of traffic. He can hear two people laughing on the street, invisible, but vivid too, like they are right there beside him. A plane pushes its lights across the inky sky. The sound of distant music, the thrum of the bass. The world!
He hears knocking. Knuckles on glass. Terrified, he turns toward his room, expecting to see his father’s furious face and the angry come-here gestures beckoning him back. But all he sees is the darkness of his old room. The knocking comes again. It’s Alice. She’s scared. She wants him to hurry. It’s her turn to be set free.
In the building just west of the Twisden house, a similarly built town house that has long since been divided up into steeply priced “cozy” apartments, a very large, tired, and discouraged middle-aged woman named Dorothy Willis lives on the dwindling inheritance left to her by her parents. She has been writing a book about an animal actor of the 1950s named Francis the Talking Mule, a book that she had thought would be easy and amusing to write, but, like everything else in her life, it became sadder and more difficult as it proceeded until she was practically unable to eke out a page, a paragraph, or even a sentence. But she remained at her desk deep into the night, playing computer solitaire, eating, trying not to eat, and surveying the backyards and lit windows of her neighbors.
For the most part, the windows of the houses within her view are curtained, and Dorothy must piece together narratives from shadows and silhouettes. It’s a bit like trying to figure out what people are saying in a language you don’t know. Is that figure of a man going up and down someone chinning himself on a bar, or is some repulsively energetic sex act being performed? Is that woman draping her arms around the silhouette of a man comforting him or seducing him, or, given the fact that neither of them has budged in twenty minutes, are they not people at all? Dorothy knows it’s rude and just a bit creepy to spy on your neighbors, but the people in the adjoining buildings are not really neighbors. She doesn’t know their names or anything else about them, which coats them all with a veneer of unreality.
As to the comings and goings in the expensive little yards below, there are often diverting things to look down upon during the warm months, but since the beginning of November the gardens have been empty save for the ever-diligent pigeons and squirrels, and a few fat rats. A couple of times, once near dawn, once around midnight, she saw Mr. Twisden digging a hole in his backyard and then burying something in a blue plastic sack, but he was so unhurried and confident that it never occurred to Dorothy that anything untoward might be happening.
But tonight she sees something that amazes her right out of her seat, though she has been sitting for so long that her legs cannot hold her bulk steadily and she immediately falls back down into the expensive orthopedically designed desk chair she treated herself to when the Talking Mule project began. But even huffing and puffing from a sitting position she sees it: a little boy is crawling through the window and scrambling onto the fire escape. Dorothy’s first thought is that the house next door is on fire, in which case the whole block might soon be engulfed in flames, most particularly the house she lives in, in which case she is in mortal danger. So once again she forces herself out of her seat and this time she goes to her window. There he is, the child, looking up at the sky—he does not look like a kid escaping from a house on fire. Yet he looks too young to be sneaking out at night to meet some little sweetheart. Dorothy presses her bulk against the window to get a better angle, and she peers out: There is no sign of flame, or smoke. And no one else but this solitary child is moving.
Oh my God! The boy almost slips off the fire escape, but he rights himself. And now he is walking toward a lit window about fifteen feet away. Dorothy is breathing with such force that her inner humidity is clouding the window. She wipes the vapor clear and by now the boy has been joined by another child, exactly his height and weight. A girl, maybe, through Dorothy cannot be certain. She herself had once been coltish and thin and had to be urged to eat. She once climbed, too, the live oak that ruled the little kingdom of their Baton Rouge backyard.…
Suddenly she sees the two children clambering down the metal staircase, the end of which sways back and forth, like the point of a blind person’s cane. They are in the yard, through the gate, gone.
Kids,
Dorothy says to herself. Well, show’s over. She gathers herself and is about to return to her desk, her book, her bag of Bugles, when all of a sudden a head pops out of the boy’s window. It must be the father. Dorothy has seen him many times, this well-built, unfriendly man, often with a hat pulled down over his brow, warmly dressed even when the weather called for short sleeves.… He looks left, right, up, and then down, and wastes no more time holding on to the illusion that those children are somehow nearby. The window slams shut and by the time Dorothy makes her way from her back window to the front of her apartment, both the father and the mother are on the street. They stand in the gauzy swirling cone of light dropped by a streetlamp, touching each other nervously as they look up and down the street. They lift their faces. They seem to be.… what? Sniffing the air? How strange. They are. They are definitely sniffing the air.
After a moment of consultation, the mother takes off in one direction and the father lopes off in another. Dorothy keeps her eyes on him. He stops, cranes his neck to see farther down the block, and then does something that almost causes her to topple over: in a seemingly effortless single move, he jumps from the sidewalk to the roof of a parked car. He seems not to be subject to the laws of gravity. From his new perch on top of the silver Mercedes, he looks up and down the block for any sign of either of his children.
Michael Medoff sits at the kitchen table, which was built into the wall in order to save space in his five-hundred-square-foot apartment on the ninth floor of an old apartment building on Twenty-First Street, near Second Avenue. The apartment would be small even if he lived there on his own, but he shares these two and a half rooms with Xavier Sardina, and the two of them, broad-shouldered and not particularly graceful, are continually trying to navigate around each other, like dancers unsure of the choreography.
Tonight, Xavier is clearing the remains of their dinner while Michael spreads out his homework on the table.
“That’s disgusting,” Xavier says over his shoulder as he slots tonight’s china into the dishwasher rack.
“What?”
“You wet your fingertip and pick up bread crumbs from the table and eat them.”
“I’m still hungry.”
“You didn’t even finish your dinner.”
“No time. I’ve got to grade sixteen essays about
Oliver Twist
and I have only…” Michael looks at his watch, an ocher-faced Elgin, a legacy from his grandfather. “Two hours before you force me to go out dancing.”
Xavier lowers his chin, arches his brows, but does not allow himself to be drawn into what he is sure is a conversational trap. Xavier and Michael go to a dance club called the Third Degree just off the West Side Highway between Bank and Bethune every Tuesday night, and every Tuesday night Xavier feels Michael’s reluctance to attend. Michael’s idea of a great night is for the two of them to sit on the sofa watching the Tennis Channel on their immense high-def screen with a bowl of low-cal popcorn between them, whereas Xavier revels in New York’s gay nightlife, the later, the louder, the more amped-up and teetering on the brink of chaos, the better.
Though Xavier left Havana and its homophobic inanities more than ten years ago and has been living in New York ever since, he continues to celebrate his freedoms with an almost desperate vigor, as if the right to dance with a man in public, to live with a man, to hold his hand on the street, to share a candlelit dinner with him in a public place, all these things and a thousand other sexual liberties might be revoked at any moment. Michael generally chooses to accommodate Xavier’s restless appetites. Though they have been together for nearly five years, Michael retains some sense of being Xavier’s host in America, as if Xavier has cabbed in from Kennedy with his heart set on taking as large a bite as humanly possible from the Big Apple. If Xavier is bored or lonely even for a day or two, Michael considers it his fault and feels as if he is not only letting down his foreign visitor but somehow putting the United States itself in an unfavorable light. Xavier exhausts him—their evenings together are rarely spent at home; they careen from discos to gallery openings to wine tastings to dinner parties to poetry readings to bookstore events to theater lofts and jazz clubs—but Michael recognizes that without Xavier he might settle into his own personality’s default position: a dour shut-in, content to leave the house for work and little else.
“You work so hard for your students, Michael,” Xavier says, letting the water in the kitchen sink heat up before using the sprayer to rinse the dishes—the torrents of hot water available strike a chord of delirium in Xavier almost as resonant as the pleasures of sexual freedom.
“Well, Zavy, it’s called doing your job,” Michael says.
“For rich kids, no? Why not go across the street to the public school and teach children who are poor and need you?”
“Every kid is poor, really,” Michael says. “Every kid is powerless. And every kid is at the mercy of his family. If they’re not loved and cared for, they’re screwed. Anyhow, I like my job, and I never forget that I am under something of a microscope simply because…”
“There must be a million gay teachers in New York, Michael,” Xavier says. He turns off the hot water, dries his hands on a dish towel. “So why you think you so nervous in your school?”
“For very good reasons, Zavy, and you know it. Starting with a homophobic headmaster.” Michael catches the towel Xavier has thrown at him, uses it to dab off some imaginary crumbs on the side of his mouth, and tosses it back.
While the towel is in midflight, the buzzer near the front door goes off, a rasping, piercing noise that the two men have dubbed the Penetrator.
“Who is that?” Xavier says, with some irritation.
The buzzer sounds its gray, grinding noise again, and Michael pushes his chair back and rises to answer the call. He presses the Talk button in the beige intercom next to the door, and the doorman, a thick-voiced elderly Irishman named James, announces that Adam Twisden-Kramer is in the lobby and wishes to be allowed up.
Adam Twisden-Kramer? The visit is so unexpected that for a moment Michael can’t connect the name to anyone he knows. But then: of course. Adam. Adam is neither the best nor the worst of Michael’s students, yet Michael holds a special fondness for the boy, recognizing in Adam’s downcast eyes and soft voice a version of himself at ten years of age, when his body and mind embarrassed him beyond endurance. Of course, there is the fainting incident.… The way the boy hit the floor with the whomp of a stack of magazines, right in the middle of class. Michael had rushed to him, held him, picked him up. As Adam regained consciousness, he opened his eyes and saw that he was borne aloft in his teacher’s arms, and for a moment there was a wide flickering stare of fear, followed almost immediately by a kind of all-encompassing peacefulness. The boy was like a young sailor swept from the deck of his vessel who learns in an instant that the sea will not swallow him but will keep him afloat. He had closed his eyes and breathed a deep sigh of relief.