Now, I understood, she was bothering to know me. I glanced outside, again saw the snow. “Get me another drink.”
She did, and one for herself, too, and we pulled ourselves up in the bed under the blue blanket, and I found myself remembering for her one winter in my little town in upstate New York, when I was twelve. “It had snowed heavily for three days and my friends and I had heard that the freight cars were frozen to the tracks. To the twelve-year-old mind this is a fascinating idea, for we had spent hour upon hour watching trains go back and forth, throwing sticks and rocks at them, putting pennies on the rail, even a dead raccoon, the decapitation of which we studied with great seriousness. On
that day we tramped through the deep snow down to the far end of the passenger station, which had a number of side tracks. Two freights were frozen in place next to each other fifty yards south of the station, and we hiked down there, examining the engines for signs of activity. There were none. We knew that we should not be near the train, but we had not climbed past any fences or gates to get there, and anyway, we enjoyed that boyish certainty that the town was ours, made for our inspection. We clambered over the engine for a few minutes, kicking off great pillows of snow and looking into the narrow, streamlined windows at the gauges and controls and what seemed to be a small, uncomfortable seat. Then we climbed down, having discovered that the wind had piled the snow between the adjacent boxcars of the two trains, almost to the actual tops of the cars themselvesâperhaps sixteen feet. A tunnel. That is what boys think of, and we set about digging one between the two boxcars, postulating snowy caverns lit by flashlight. That is what boys think of, not that they will find, while digging, a bootâ”
“Oh,” Caroline said aloud.
“âwhich, in but a moment, turned into a boot with a frozen leg attached, and the tip of a hand. The two other boys jolted backward, screaming. I was a few feet away and had not seen it. The others took off hollering across the train yard, running awkwardly through the deep snow, exercising their terror, invoking an official adult response. I was left there. I began to run but was not compelled to do it. I turned back to the anonymous leg, and then stepped between the boxcars of one of the trains and in the woods stripped a leafless branch from a young maple. Then with the stick I swept the snow away from the body. The boot and leg became two legs. Then the hand became an arm and shoulder. I gingerly brushed the snow from one side of the face. The head was sunken into the chest. A chin. A cheek. A frozen, glassy eye. It was an old man, and the snow stayed piled on his hatless bald head and on his ears. The other eye was almost shut. His ears had snow in them. There was a cigarette butt frozen to his collar. I was terrified now, but also strangely thrilled, and I kept brushing
at the body, even using my hands a bit. We seemed to be in intimate relation to each other. I took off my glove, looked over my shoulder, then touched my finger to his cheek. It was hard as ice. I could see that he had built a small, useless fire next to himself. The little bottle in the paper bag, the week-old newspaperâno doubt gathered from one of the trash cans in the train stationâthe hat on the ground. It was a tableau of the last despair, and I stared at it for a long time, begging to hear the secrets contained within, desperate to know what was happening to me as I looked. Then behind me came the excited shouts from my friends as they raced ahead of the stationmaster, a fat man of maybe fifty who huffed up and yelled at me with nervous anger to step back. Not long after that, the town sheriff ordered us to leave and go home, and I held myself a few steps away from my friends, feeling myself made different and strange by what had happened, by what I had chosen to do while they were gone.”
I stopped, looked at Caroline.
“That was a good one.” She moved close to me in the darkness, as a siren raced down the avenue below. “Tell me another.”
“Is this what we do for entertainment? Lie around at night and tell dead-people stories?”
“Yes.” She flicked an ash off her breast. “It's fun and you know it. Anyway, I'm just accommodating your perversions.”
The cigarette smoke was poisoning me deliciously. “You don't know me well enough to know what my perversions are.”
“Yes I do,” she laughed.
“Tell me.”
“You don't want to know.”
“Tell me.”
Silence. Then: “You look for death. I think that's a kind of perversion.”
“You were right,” I said after a moment.
“What?”
“I didn't want to know that.”
“Tell me another one,” she said.
“There's the first body I saw as a newspaper reporter.”
“Okay.”
“I was nineteen.”
“Did you know anything yet?”
“No,” I said. “Did you know anything when you were nineteen?”
“I knew how to get in trouble. Tell me your story first.”
“I was in Jacksonville, Florida. I was a summer reporter at the
Florida Times-Union,
a big regional paper. My girlfriend at the time and I drove down in her 'sixty-nine MG convertible, full of rust, you could see the highway going by between your feet. We rented a cockroach apartment. She got a job as a cocktail waitress, I worked at the newspaper. I started out on the news desk but they moved me to features, because there wasn't much local news, really, just corrupt real-estate deals and navy pilots dumping their planes, and they could see that I could do the feature stuff. So one of my features was a day in the life of an ambulance crew. Pretty clichéd story, but I was a kid, I didn't know anything. So I rode around in the ambulance. There was a lot of boring stuff, heart attacks, stuff likeâ”
I looked over at where her hand was on herself.
“You're doing what I think you're doing?”
“Yes. Your voice is sexy.”
“Would you likeâ?”
“Keep telling the story.”
I looked at the ceiling.
“Just tell the story, sweetie.”
I took a breath. “A call came in and we drove into a trailer park. Depressing place. Everything was sand and scrub pines and old cars and busted-down trailers. We pulled up to the one we were looking forâdoes that really feel good?”
“Yes. I'm listening and I'm doing thisâand it's just right.”
“When we got there I saw that a neighbor was leading a little boy away from the trailer. This tall, skinny guy comes out in bell-bottoms. He was a sailor. There was a big navy base in the area. The tall guy doesn't have a shirt. He waves us closer. He was skinny and blond and he's just about my
age. I mean, he's exactly my age but we're living very different lives. So we get out quickly, and he's worried and upset and says, âIt's my baby, it's my baby girl'âI can't tell thisâJesus, you're lying there masturbating.”
“Tell it.”
“It's a fucking sacrilege.”
“Tell it.”
“We go up the steps of the trailer and inside there's a pretty Puerto Rican girl, and she is weeping and taking her fists way above her head and slamming them down on her legs, really punching herself hard, really hurting herself. And the sailor takes us through this cramped trailer into a tiny nursery with no pictures on the wall, no Mickey Mouse or anything, and there in the crib is this six-month-old baby girl lying faceup, and the EMTs get to work on the baby and they try for a while, while the woman is wailing outside in the other room. I'm just standing there like the most freaked-out person in the world.”
Caroline's hand touched my penis.
“They worked on the baby with their oxygen and tried to get a heartbeat going, and then they gave up and called the code and one of them went out to talk to the mother and father. And so it was just me and this older guy, the EMT, and he started looking at the baby very carefully, even opened up the diaper. And I asked him what he was doingâI mean I was still freaked out, but I had to ask him. He said he was checking the baby for signs of abuse, bruises, whatever. And I said, What do you see? He said that the linen on the crib was clean, the baby was well-nourished, there were no bruises, cuts, or marks on the baby, the baby's hair was clean, her fingernails were trimmed, the diaper was clean, the littleâdo you
have
to do that?”
Her mouth was on me now. She lifted her head. “Talk. I'm listening.”
I took a breath. “The baby was clean, there was no diaper rash, not even a tiny spot. The EMT looked at me and said that the baby had received perfect care. Perfect. Then he turned the baby onto her stomach and pointed out two purplish
stripes on either side of the spinal column. That was the lividity, the blood settling in the corpse. Then he turned the baby over and brought down her eyes and cleaned up the little bits of wrappers and tubes and stuff in the crib and then told the other EMT to call in the mother and father. I was there when they came in and the woman's face ⦠she saw her daughter ⦠ah ⦠she saw her daughter, and it was like wires yanking her face back across her skull ⦠I looked at the boy, the father, and he was military, he'd been trained not to show emotion and he was biting his bottom lip so hard that there was blood on his teeth. I sawâahh ⦠I saw that andâneverânever forgot it.”
My words seemed to echo in the darkness. It might reflect better on me if I could say that my tale finally short-circuited our lust, but that would not be true, and a reporter is supposed to tell the truth. Caroline, straddling me, presenting her hips forward, pulling back, presenting forward, seemed to be arguing a pointâthat her appetite could not be dulled by stories of wives and frozen drunks and dead babies. In this, I felt her to be my teacher. I have no doubt that we could have had graphic footage of the Holocaust projected on every wall, truckloads of gray, emaciated bodies being emptied into mass graves, and that I could still have effortlessly pushed myself into her, my face a mask of satiation and triumph. Perhaps that makes me godless, awful. But I do not think so. For I think that when we have sex, those corpses are always projected there on the walls of the imagination, dropping limply and heartbreakingly into the mass grave of time. Yes, I am sure of this. Those bodies are always there; they are the people outside the room and the people past, the people future, our parents and our children; they are our lost selves of youth, our selves of the moment and selves of tomorrow, all doomed.
Â
Â
We fell back to the sheets. “I'm finished,” I told her. “That's it.”
“Out of gas?”
“Out of juice.”
She got up, brushed her hair at the dresser, and collected our glasses. “You hungry?”
“Yes.”
“I'm going to make something.” She left the room.
It was close to eight now. Lisa would be putting the kids to bed, waiting for a call from me. I wasn't ready to make it. I couldn't be sure of my voice. Maybe the drinking helped, maybe not. But there was something else, too. As a reporter you have conversations with strangers by the thousands. Some of them go quickly, some are agonizing. But in a successful interview, there is an identifiable moment, which, as I have mentioned, might be called the point of dilation, when the speaker opens up. Did I intend to interview Caroline? In a sense, yes. The dilation was coming, I could feel it. I knew that now that I had talked she would, too. This is why people exchange stories. They want to be known. The story is a kind of currency. If you give one, you usually will get one back. I didn't want to call Lisa, because I didn't want to break the moment with Caroline; either she would overhear the call or I would hang up the phone possessed by guilt. The chance would go, maybe forever.
But there were some other calls I could make. I picked up the phone next to the bed and dialed Bobby Dealy, who had just started his overnight shift.
“What's going on?” I said.
“Burning building in Harlem, one alarm, lady says her grilled-cheese sandwich caught on fire.” His voice was flat. “Man left a snake on a bus outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. Cop shot in the leg in the Bronx. Several Nubians arrested on suspicion of being suspicious. Let's seeâtwo guys from New Jersey jumped two gay guys in the Village, called them fags, the gay guys beat the shit out of them. Also, we got a girl in a nursing home who has been in a coma for twenty years who is pregnant.”
“Raped.”
“Right. Thing is, her eyes move. Follow people around the room.”
“The guy raped a woman in a coma and she could still watch him?”
“TV people are all over it.”
I sighed. “What else?”
“Philosopher with a knife arrested in the U.S. Passport Office in Rockefeller Center.”
“What was that one?”
“It was the line for emergency passports,” Bobby said. “The guy wanted to get out of the United States. Country going to hell, couldn't stand in line with everybody else.”