Fitting Ends (16 page)

The next day, rent was due. But he didn't have enough money in his account, and he had even tried calling his parents from a pay phone. “Boy, I know it can be tough financially those first few years out of college,” his father had said. “You know we'd help you out if we could, but we just can't.” He couldn't bring himself to tell his father how desperate things were. How would he explain where his money had gone when he didn't know himself ?

He decided that rather than panic, he would just have to wait a few weeks until his next paycheck. Then he would just go without groceries for a while, that was all. He tried not to let himself imagine his debt rolling over and over, accumulating. It would be all right, he told himself.

He was thinking this, actually whispering it under his breath, when he rounded the corner and bumped into the two boys. They had been walking close together, their shoulders almost touching, and he stepped into them as if into an invisible wall.

“Oh,” he said. “Excuse me!” He grinned. They seemed young, maybe seniors in high school.

“You better take care, mister,” said the taller of the two. “Your head in the clouds.”

“Yes, well,” he said, a bit flustered. They were at the mouth of an alleyway, near a liquor store that hadn't opened yet. In the distance, people were striding toward the rapid transit station. “I guess I'm a little spaced out,” he said. “Sorry.”

The boys exchanged glances, and it was then that he began to have a feeling. He hadn't been able to see his muggers—it was too dark and fast—but an image flashed through his mind, like a single frame of film, and he had the sudden intuition that these boys were his attackers. It was the way they looked at one another, as if trying not to chortle; it was the way they had their eyes fixed on him. Yet they were so young and clean cut. He told himself not to be paranoid.

“How much do you want for those sunglasses?” the taller one said.

He was wearing a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses that made him, he thought, look sort of hip. Sandy had given them to him. He took them off, and he sensed how easy it would be for the boys to pull him into the alleyway. He put his fingers on the grate across the liquor store window. “They're not for sale,” he said. “Thanks for offering.”

“I'll give you ten dollars for them,” the taller one said. The boys smiled, and Alan watched as the taller one took a black leather wallet out of his back pocket. Of course, many people have black wallets, Alan told himself. But it looked very much like the one the muggers had taken from him.

“Those are the nicest sunglasses I've ever seen,” said the boy.

“No, no,” Alan said. “Seriously. They have sentimental value.”

The two boys stood there, and Alan wondered whether he could grab something—a blade of broken glass, a stone—to fend them off. Then they turned. “Stay cool,” the smaller one said. When they rounded the corner, walking toward the space of ground where he'd been mugged, Alan thought he heard them laugh.

This was not a story that would amuse people, he thought: it made him sound insane. Often, he would finish relating some anecdote, and the silent faces of his coworkers or friends would be like the heavy ticking of a clock. It made him cringe. Once, he'd told someone about the time he had worms as a child. It had seemed comical in his head, but afterward, when he was alone, he was so filled with disgust at himself that he'd struck his idiot mouth with his fist, making it bleed. Once, he was trying to tell Sandy about the Pete Preneta Trainee Week—how the company had shipped them all to Atlanta, where they lived in dorms and learned about Firm policy—but Sandy stopped him halfway through. She shook her head. “You know what's weird,” she said. “You're not who you think you are.” She wouldn't explain what she meant.

Alan gazed out the window of the train. He'd taken this trip hundreds of times now, but nothing ever looked familiar. They could be taking him anywhere. At some corners, buildings slid by only a few feet from the window; walls shuffled past in a blur of colors and textures—grimy red brick or wood or ancient brownstone, the crowns and curlicues and stylized letters of gang graffiti, billboard models with their eyes and teeth blocked out. Then suddenly, there would be a flash of open sky, and an empty school yard would appear, or a street, tunneling its way toward Lake Michigan. Then, just as abruptly, the train descended into the underground, and there was only darkness, or in a sudden flicker of light, the crumbling damp walls and shadowy nooks and crannies of the subway. The train conductor mumbled out the names of the stops in bursts of static over the PA system, but Alan could never understand the words. Often, it wasn't until he recognized his stop that he was sure he wasn't going the wrong way.

The rent—of course it came back to him in the middle of the day, while he was trying to talk to Dugan. There was this buzz in his head, like interference from a distant station on the radio.

“So—like, my father,” Alan was telling Dugan, “is in the unions? An organizer. He's, you know, fairly big.” He wasn't sure how this had started, how it had led into this lie about his father.

“What union?” Dugan said. He seemed vaguely interested, turning the heavy gold ring on his finger around and around.

“Teamster,” Alan said quickly. “A real old-time progressive, you know.”

“The unions are dying fast,” Dugan mused. He looked at Alan pointedly, and Alan tried to remember where the conversation had been going before this terrible detour. It had been something about Dugan's parents.

“Well . . . yeah,” Alan said. “That's what I tell him. He's always giving me crap about working here, for a corporation and all. But I tell him, you know, this is the nineties.” This was one of Dugan's phrases, and Alan waited a moment for some slight acknowledgment.

“Hmmm,” Dugan said. This was the longest and most personal conversation Alan remembered he and Dugan ever engaging in. But it was fading fast. “Well, anyway,” Dugan said.

“Hey,” Alan said. “You know what I wanted to ask you.” He hesitated for a moment, but the buzz in his head had grown loud enough that he thought he could risk it. “You know those emergency loans they talk about in the employee handbook?”

“Yeah?” Dugan said.

“How do you get one?”

Dugan considered him, his expression flickering. He looked suspicious, and Alan could sense that the rapport had been killed. So that's why he came to my office, Dugan was thinking. “What's the emergency,” Dugan said at last.

“I don't know,” Alan said weakly. “I'm out of money?”

Dugan's face was blank for a long second. Then, as if Alan's voice had just reached him from a distance, he chuckled. “Nice, Lowe,” he said. “Very cute.”

A few days later, on a Saturday, Alan saw Dugan walking down a street. This was in Alan's neighborhood, far from the Gold Coast condo where Dugan lived. What was he doing here? Alan wondered, and he felt a trickling sensation go through him. He'd never before seen someone from work in the civilian world, and there was something unsettling about it. He saw Dugan come out of an occult bookstore wearing a thick leather jacket with a fur collar, striding slowly, purposefully away from him. He waited for Dugan to get a bit ahead of him; then he followed.

It was an unseasonably warm day for January, and Alan had been wandering the street all morning, trying to stay out of the apartment for fear his landlord would come looking for him. But he'd felt edgy and vulnerable out in the open, and he'd been trying to stick close to people. For a while, he'd browsed in windows beside an elderly lady in heavy makeup and a fur. Perhaps, he imagined, people passing would think she was his mother, and he tried to look bored and impatient. It wasn't long before he'd made her nervous, however, and she hurried away.

He'd followed Dugan a few blocks when he remembered that he was wearing the trench coat. The realization branched across his skin like frost: it was impossible, but he had actually forgotten that it was stolen. When he paid for the dry cleaning, it had been as if he'd purchased the coat. It felt like he'd always owned it, now.

He stopped and swiftly shed the coat. For a moment, he considered stashing it somewhere. But of course it would be stolen. He folded it a couple of times and then rolled it up tightly, as his father had taught him to roll sleeping bags on camping trips when he was a child. He bent down and picked up a piece of newspaper that was lying on the street, wrapping it carefully around the bundled coat. When he tucked this cocoonlike creation under his arm, it looked like he was just carrying a newspaper—the Sunday edition, but a paper nevertheless.

Dugan had stopped, too. He was peering into a storefront window, absently drumming his thighs with the heels of his hands, as if trying to remember a tune. From a distance, Dugan's mouth looked odd, doll-like. It took Alan a minute to realize Dugan was whistling.

Alan hung back. He knew he should take his opportunity, turn back before Dugan caught sight of him. And yet there was something exciting about this. For once, it was as if he knew more than everyone else on the street, he had his own secret purpose. He was transformed into someone shadowy yet magnetic, someone larger. Maybe this was what his muggers had felt.

Dugan was completely unaware. He walked on, pausing sometimes in front of a store. Where was he going? Alan cruised easily around the little islands of walking people, sometimes letting Dugan drift far ahead, sometimes drawing close enough that if Dugan turned, he would surely see him. But he didn't turn.

At the end of the block, Dugan went into a coffee shop. When Alan got to the entrance, he peered in the doorway just in time to see the hostess leading Dugan to a booth. The angry-looking Greek man at the cash register looked over at Alan as he was watching Dugan being seated. Alan smiled. He'd been in this coffee shop several times, and the man, the owner apparently, was always nasty to him.

“You coming in or going out? What?” the man said to him. “You want me to heat the whole world?” Alan pulled back uncertainly, but then he surprised himself by giving the man the finger. Then he went out quickly, imagining for a moment that the man might come after him. But the man just waved a tired hand at him, making an ugly face from beyond the glass doors. Alan tapped his crotch, as he'd seen disgruntled people do. “Heat this,” he said, and then he stepped back a few paces, out of the man's line of vision, and leaned against the wall. He didn't want to get in a confrontation and risk drawing Dugan's attention.

But he was pleased with himself. “Heat this”: it was a very urban thing to say, the kind of response Dugan himself might have for such a person. Generally, Alan never thought of quick comebacks until long after the fact; often they would come to him when he was trying to go to sleep and he lay there with his eyes open.

People walked by, and he looked at their shoes. Sandy had once told him that if you make eye contact with people on the street, you're asking for trouble: that was in July, when he'd nodded at a man in a big Russian-style fur hat as he and Sandy came out of a bar. The man had followed them for blocks, asking for money, and they hadn't been able to go to the automatic teller machine until he'd finally given up on them. “What's wrong with you?” Sandy had said afterwards. “Do you like being harassed?” But it was hard to avoid looking into people's faces; often he'd find himself smiling and saying “Morning” to those he passed, as his father used to on the streets of their small town.

But now, he didn't look up. He leaned back against the wall, hardening his face, narrowing his eyes as if he were concealing a weapon. It made him smile a little to imagine that some redneck was walking by, trying not to look at him.

When Dugan came out, that warm sensation of menace rose up in him like a rush of adrenaline. It was the opposite of what he'd been feeling on the street for weeks now. The people strolling by seemed as vulnerable and trusting as the pigeons that waddled around statues downtown, moving out of the paths of passersby so slowly you could kick one, if you wanted.

It wouldn't feel bad to kick Dugan, he thought. There was something annoyingly mincing about the way he walked. He was so proud of those dainty, slipperlike Italian shoes, with their ridiculous sheen, and Alan could tell he was keeping an eye on the ground to avoid stepping in something that might mess them up a little. It wouldn't feel bad to take a blowtorch to those shoes.

Nothing bad could ever happen to Dugan: that was how he acted, that was what he said with his pace and his whistling. He would never lock eyes with a crazy man on the street; such a person didn't quite exist in Dugan's dimension. He never shuddered as strangers brushed past. Not even a knife in the heart could faze him.

Alan's hands were shaking, but it was a good feeling. When he was little, his father imagined he was going to be an athlete and taught him how to box. If he let down his guard, his father struck a good one to his face or chest, and by the end of a session, Alan's hands would be shaking like that. “You got the butterflies?” his father would say, feigning punches. “You nervous?” That was good, his father told him. It meant his body was getting him prepared.

Prepared for what?

He wasn't going to do it, he thought. But then Dugan was slowing down, flexing his shoulders luxuriously, as he always did when he'd made some nasty comment. Nice, Lowe. Very cute, Alan thought, and then he knew he was going to do it after all. They had strolled off the busy street, away from the shops and people, and when Alan saw Dugan turn down a narrow alleyway, toward a parking lot, Alan quickened.

He felt his hand pull the trench coat from under his arm; he worked swiftly to unravel it as he came up on Dugan, stretching it out, and just as Dugan heard the rushing footsteps and began to turn, Alan pulled the coat over his head from behind.