The Fool of New York City Page 4

  3

  Homeland security

  We are lying on our backs, trying to drift into sleep. The electric lamp and the crystal chandelier in the center of the ceiling are turned off, but enough city light filters through the window that I can dimly make out shapes in the room. The city is noisy, despite the lateness of the hour.

  I am feeling warm under the sleeping bag, no longer so afraid. I am not hungry either, since the giant made a five-pound hamburger-and-onion-and-spoonful-of-diced-pickle meatloaf for supper, most of which he ate.

  “We are very fortunate people,” he murmurs groggily, for now the daytime current of his ideas, goals, and habits is giving way to a slower flow of consciousness. The determined course of a mighty river disseminates into streams, and then into a myriad of trickles.

  I cannot think of anything to say.

  “I am so fortunate to have a place like this,” he goes on. “It’s been condemned by the building inspector as unsafe and unhealthy, and the landlord wants to sell it. But he’s going to wait a couple of years until the real estate market recovers. I live here rent free, keep the boiler in the basement going, make sure no one busts in and wrecks the place. One by one the other tenants have left, and the landlord won’t rent to anyone new. He might keep the building and renovate it into deluxe rental apartments, or he might sell it as is. Until then I have a home.”

  “Where will you go when you leave?” I mumble.

  “I don’t know, but I’ll find something. New York City must be full of these grand old places that no one wants. I scout around now and then. Did you notice the crystal chandelier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as odd, Francisco?”

  “In what way?”

  “The ceiling is twelve feet above the floor, which is a tremendous boon to a person like me. Even the chandelier is higher than my head. But why such a marvel for a tiny room hardly bigger than a closet?”

  “Maybe the people who constructed this building liked chandeliers.”

  “It was built in the eighteen hundreds. This entire floor was once a single apartment with many rooms, the home of people with money. It was broken up into little flats after the war.”

  “Maybe all the rooms in the building have chandeliers.”

  “No, they don’t. I’ve been inside every one. The other three apartments on this floor are empty now, and only one of them had a chandelier, but the last tenant tore it out and took it away when he left. His apartment was as small as this one.”

  The giant sighs.

  “It’s sad,” he continues. “The way some people get trapped in a corner and then do foolish things, because they think it’s their only way to survive. My neighbor’s name was Jimmy de Locke, he told me. After he left with the chandelier, I began to wonder if it was a pseudonym.”

  “You mean alias,” I correct him. “If he was a writer, it might have been a pseudonym. If he was a thief, it would have been an alias.”

  “He was an old man. He never washed or shaved, and he drank a lot. Sometimes I took him a plate of meatloaf when he’d been drinking too much and wasn’t eating. His room was just like mine, except it had stacks of unopened boxes of electronic equipment in it. But I never saw any books or papers or typewriter or computer.”

  The giant pauses.

  “You know, Francisco, it’s interesting the way you come up with the perfect word for this or that, but you can’t remember where you come from or what happened to you. In my studies, I’ve read about brain trauma. It seems to me you may be a victim of a mini-stroke, maybe a series of them, but it would have been some time ago because the MRI showed no trace in your brain. The doctor at the ER said there was no evidence of skull fracture either, no lumps, no abrasions, no scars.”

  “Do you think I have become mentally ill? It might have happened because I have lived too long, seen too much.”

  “Like an overload, a blown-fuse kind of thing? Maybe. Or it could be a case of your brain just needing a holiday and taking it without asking your permission. It packed your belongings into boxes and stuffed them into a storage room in the attic of your mind. Then it locked the storage room and the attic door and pocketed the key.”

  I sit up in bed and lean back against the wall.

  “So everything—everything—could still be up there,” I say, feeling a strange mixture of hope and dread.

  “Uh-huh, it probably is. And nobody’s forcing you to unlock the door and unpack all that stuff. It’s only if you want to. Only when you’re ready.”

  “I want to. I feel lost without it. I do not know where to go, where to direct my life. I know only that I am Francisco de Goya and that I once painted fine works of art. I also know a few important words like stethoscope and alias, and I can read the Greek alphabet, but I don’t know why I know these things.”

  “You also know you were a boy in a cold land.”

  “Yes, I wore skates. And I had a toy car, which I lost under the ice. There were lost rings too, underwater, buried by colored leaves, a life frozen in time. Beyond this, I see nothing.”

  “Do you want to see more?”

  I hesitate. “Y-yes, I think so.”

  “Okay then. The more things we look at and the more places we go, the more you’ll remember. We need to find the pocket where your brain put the key and forgot about it. Maybe it’s not just one key but many keys—a keychain.”

  I nod in the dark, though he cannot see me.

  “Of course, there’s a lot to discover in New York City,” the giant continues. “A lifetime’s worth. Even I will never plumb the depths of it, because it’s always changing, growing mostly. It swallows other cities too. It’s as big as the world. But you have to make a start somewhere. So my suggestion is, tomorrow we’ll resume our search. If you agree, we’ll begin with a clue and follow it to its end.”

  “Which clue?”

  “Hmm, that’s a good question. We already know that you are an artist, and quite old. The other main clue is the hockey.”

  “The hockey?”

  “Yes. Skates, snow, hockey sweater. What you described is too distinct to be merely a phantasm.”

  “What is a phantasm?”

  “An ethereal imagining.”

  “You are a very intelligent person, Billy.”

  “Some basketball players are highly intelligent, Francisco. I am not. I think I’m an average sort of person. But now and then I’ve met geniuses on the court. You get talking in the locker room, go out for a jumbo espresso, the fraternity of the exceptionally tall. People open up to me, you see, whenever they get over their initial fear.”

  “They reveal their minds.”

  “Yup. And I reveal mine too. Or I did, before I grew too tall to play.”

  “When did you become too tall to play?”

  “Well, I reached six foot four when I was fourteen years old, and was six eleven when I turned seventeen and got the scholarship. I was over seven feet when I had my accident and forgot who I was for a while. I think I mentioned that to you. Anyway, when I recovered from the accident, I wasn’t much good for professional basketball, and the university let me go. I tried to play pickup games in vacant lots, but at a certain stage I realized it was unfair of me to continue, since I just dribbled over to the hoop and dropped the ball in, every time. It really frustrated shorter players. But you see my point.”

  He has thrown a lot of images into my mind, some of which I do not understand. Confused, I shake my head.

  “The point is, it’s good for people to open up to others. Sooner or later, a person has to make a choice to trust. You gotta start trusting someone, even if it takes you places you hadn’t expected, even to hard places.”

  Do I trust this giant? I know he is good. But what if I am not good? What if I am hiding a crime, have become my alias, like Jimmy de Locke?

  I hear a mammoth yawn, like a low note on a tuba.

  “Well, it’s been a long day. And tomorrow we’re going to Toronto,” mu
rmurs the giant.

  “Toronto! Really?”

  “Yup. Good night, Francisco.”

  “Good night, Billy.”

  At eight o’clock in the morning, the giant comes tromping up the staircase and into the apartment, waking me from a dream I can’t remember.

  “Our ride will be here soon,” he declares with a look of boyish enthusiasm. “Get dressed and wash, but don’t worry about breakfast—I’ve packed some food, and we can eat along the way.”

  Downstairs, a delivery van sits idling by the curb in front of the building’s entrance. Its driver is waiting by the double doors in the rear, a corpulent man in his fifties wearing a creaking brown leather jacket and a matching cap. He opens the doors with a subtle amused look, shaking his head as if this beats all, despite the fact that a delivery man in New York City has probably seen plenty. He chuckles as we climb in.

  The van’s cargo area is empty, save for a rug on the floor and mattresses positioned along the sides like two sofas facing each other. The giant sits down on one, and I take the other. There are no side windows, though a sliding glass in the forward wall gives access to the driver’s compartment. It is closed. We can see him. He can see us in his rearview mirror. He makes the engine roar and pulls out into the street.

  “Here we go, Francisco,” says the giant. “Is it a long journey to Toronto?” I ask. “Mmm, pretty long. About eight hours to the border, and then a few more hours to the city. I’ve hired this man for three days. We’ll sleep in a motel overnight, if they have motels in Canada, and we’ll do some exploring the next day, look at the sights and major landmarks. Back home the day after that. If you ever lived there, I think you’ll recognize things, get the juices flowing, remember more and more. One step might lead to another. If not, at least we tried.”

  “It must have cost a lot of money to hire the driver and his vehicle.”

  “Not too much. Besides, it’s worth the adventure. I haven’t left NYC since my accident.”

  “When was your accident?”

  A flicker of pain passes through his eyes.

  “The year 2001.”

  “Were you badly hurt?”

  “Uh-huh. Spent about three months in the hospital, a couple more in rehab.”

  “Did you fall down a staircase or get hit by a subway?”

  “It was a car accident. My parents had driven here from our farm in the Des Moines valley—I’m from Iowa originally. They’d come to visit me at college and watch me play in a big game. There was a scout from the New York Knicks there that night, and I scored high. Me and my folks were pretty excited on the way back to the hotel. Dad wasn’t a very good driver to begin with, and he’d never driven in a city as huge as New York, at least not like this one. But it wasn’t his fault, the accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “Our car was Dad’s invention. He welded it together from an old Dodge station wagon and a John Deere grain hopper. It had a big back door and the small hopper bolted upside down over the rear passenger section, the roof cut out—something I could sit inside without crunching. We rode in it for years. We got broadsided by a car that went through a red light. It was racing to get away from a police car, and it hit us at top speed. The police car crashed into us too. Everyone died but me.”

  “I am very sorry, Billy.”

  He nods, eyes moist, firming his lips to keep them from trembling.

  “Thanks.”

  We say nothing for a while. We enter a long tunnel under a river, and on the other side a sign tells us we are now in New Jersey. Through the front window I watch canyons of passing high rises.

  “The Statue of Liberty,” I say, pointing at a statuette on the vehicle’s dashboard.

  “Bravo, Francisco, bravo!” says the giant, his shine restored.

  “Like the jackdaw,” I reply.

  “The jackdaw? What’s a jackdaw?”

  “The bird on a string in the self-portrait I painted. The one we saw in the museum.”

  “Oh, right. We call them grackles, kind of a blackbird. But the statue doesn’t look anything like a bird.”

  “No, but the idea. Freedom.”

  “Mmm,” he says, turning inward to his own thoughts, musing. He is sitting with his knees up, feet wide apart, forearms on knees, hands clasped between them. His eyes grow drowsy, then they close. His head droops. He sleeps.

  I notice for the first time the white striations on the back of his skull, showing through bristling brown hair. Scars from the accident. For a time I watch his head bobbing with the motion of the vehicle.

  Who is this giant? Why is he helping me?

  The driver pulls off the turnpike we’ve been traveling on and rolls into a rest stop. The giant gives him money, and the man goes into a fast-food restaurant to order takeout food. Ten hamburgers for Billy, two for me, two for the driver. Large paper cup of coffee for the giant, water for me, cola for the driver.

  The three of us sit together in the back of the van consuming our meal. When the giant has finished eating his hamburgers, he opens the paper shopping bag he brought along and extracts a meatloaf sandwich. Plus a quarter pound of cheese. The driver watches him eat it.

  “You sure have a big appetite,” he comments at one point.

  “I am a large person,” says Billy. “Large people need a lot of fuel, because we burn up way more energy than shorter people.”

  “I noticed,” says the driver. He slaps his knees and says, “Well, it’s another hour to the border. Ready to go?”

  So, away we go, ever northward through fields and forests and small towns dozing under blankets of snow. The sky is overcast, but nothing is dropping out of it. Blackbirds rise cawing from old cornfields.

  The giant removes a gallon jug of milk from the bag and drinks half of it down, his head tilted back, his larynx rising and falling in his neck.

  When he is finished, he says with a smack of satisfaction, “I used to drink three of these a day when I was growing up. I needed a lot of calcium.”

  “To make strong bones.”

  “Yes, Francisco. Otherwise you get a brittle skeleton. Doctors always told me I have very strong bones. Also, my teeth don’t have a single cavity. Must have been something in our water at the farm. It was a dairy farm, three hundred head, never any shortage of milk. So you see, I’ve been fortunate from the beginning.”

  “Was it cause or effect?”

  “What do you mean, Francisco?”

  “Did you grow so tall because of genetics alone, or did all that milk make you grow, plus the mysterious thing in your water?”

  “Mum and Dad didn’t grow like me. Nobody on neighboring farms did either. We had everything tested—water, milk, feed. Dad didn’t like growth hormones in the feed. It was always a hundred percent pure grain and mash. There wasn’t anything in it that would’ve caused my condition. That’s the wrong word. It’s not a condition like a medical disability. It’s a special gift. As I said, I’m one of the luckiest people in the world.”

  “Except for the accident.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” he murmurs, sobering, looking away.

  “I am sorry. I should not have brought it up.”

  “That’s okay. It’s good you’re an honest person.”

  But I can see I have hurt him. We say no more until the van slows and passes an American flag on a pole, then uniformed guards and a set of single-story buildings. We do not stop. Slowing still more, we glide past a flag with red sidebars and a red maple leaf.

  “Canada,” shouts the driver through the glass panel. “Got your papers?”

  The van stops at a gate, and a uniformed lady steps up to the driver’s window.

  “Where are you going today?” she asks.

  “Toronto,” says the driver, handing her his passport.

  “Where you coming from?” she asks as she flips through the pages.

  “New York City, the Big Apple.”

  She smiles. “Carrying any cargo?”

  �
��Just two passengers.”

  She looks in the window, but can’t see me and the giant.

  “Would you open up the back, please? I need to have a look at your passengers’ ID.”

  “Sure thing, lady.” He raps on the glass panel. “Time to get out, guys. Have your passports ready.”

  The giant pulls a lever and opens the back doors. He steps out first, just as the lady comes around to meet us. By the time I am out, she is not seeing me at all. She is open mouthed and staring up into his face. She doesn’t say a thing.

  Two other Canadian border guards come out of their building and walk over, young people in uniform, all of them mute and wide-eyed.

  The lady clears her throat.

  “Um, could I see some identification, please?”

  The giant fishes in his trouser pocket and brings forth a crumpled piece of paper.

  “All I have is my birth certificate,” he says. “I was born in Iowa. I live in New York now.”

  She takes the document and examines it closely.

  “William C”—she squinted to get a better look—“Revere, Des Moines, Iowa, August 15, 1981,” she reads aloud. “How come the C name is scratched out?”

  “The C is for Cicero. I never really liked it. I got teased about it a lot in school. It’s a middle name, not a family name. My dad was a fan of an author named Cicero.”

  “We’re going to need more than this,” she says, looking back and forth between the paper and the giant’s face.

  “I’m sorry, it’s all I have. All I ever needed, really. I kept my university student card for years, but then I lost it.”

  “Driver’s license, or anything else with photo ID?”

  “I never learned to drive.”

  “Social Security number?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Virtually everyone in the U.S. has one, sir. Are you living in the country illegally?”

  “I’m not illegal, ma’am. I really am from Iowa.”

  “Well, you sure don’t look like a terrorist.”