A Dirty Job

Chapter 2

   

  2

  A FINE EDGE

  There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality - there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

  So Charlie was barely even aware of his own shrieks in Rachel's hospital room, of being sedated, of the filmy electric hysteria that netted everything he did for that first day. After that, it was a memory out of a sleepwalk, scenes filmed from a zombie's eye socket, as he ambled undead through explanations, accusations, preparations, and ceremony.

  "It's called a cerebral thromboembolism," the doctor had said. "A blood clot forms in the legs or pelvis during labor, then moves to the brain, cutting off the blood supply. It's very rare, but it happens. There was nothing we could do. Even if the crash team had been able to revive her, she'd have had massive brain damage. There was no pain. She probably just felt sleepy and passed. "

  Charlie whispered to keep from screaming, "The man in mint green! He did something to her. He injected her with something. He was there and he knew that she was dying. I saw him when I brought her CD back. "

  They showed him the security tapes - the nurse, the doctor, the hospital's administrators and lawyers - they all watched the black-and-white images of him leaving Rachel's room, of the empty hallway, of his returning to her room. No tall black man dressed in mint green. They didn't even find the CD.

  Sleep deprivation, they said. Hallucination brought on by exhaustion. Trauma. They gave him drugs to sleep, drugs for anxiety, drugs for depression, and they sent him home with his baby daughter.

  Charlie's older sister, Jane, held baby Sophie as they spoke over Rachel and buried her on the second day. He didn't remember picking out a casket or making arrangements. It was more of the somnambulant dream: his in-laws moving to and fro in black, like tottering specters, spouting the inadequate clich??s of condolence: We're so sorry. She was so young. What a tragedy. If there's anything we can do. . .

  Rachel's father and mother held him, their heads pressed together in the apex of a tripod. The slate floor in the funeral-home foyer spotted with their tears. Every time Charlie felt the shoulders of the older man heave with a sob, he felt his own heart break again. Saul took Charlie's face in his hands and said, "You can't imagine, because I can't imagine. " But Charlie could imagine, because he was a Beta Male, and imagination was his curse; and he could imagine because he had lost Rachel and now he had a daughter, that tiny stranger sleeping in his sister's arms. He could imagine the man in mint green taking her.

  Charlie looked at the tear-spotted floor and said, "That's why most funeral homes are carpeted. Someone could slip. "

  "Poor boy," said Rachel's mother. "We'll sit shivah with you, of course. "

  Charlie made his way across the room to his sister, Jane, who wore a man's double-breasted suit in charcoal pinstripe gabardine, that along with her severe eighties pop-star hairstyle and the infant in the pink blanket that she held, made her appear not so much androgynous as confused. Charlie thought the suit actually looked better on her than it did on him, but she should have asked him for permission to wear it nonetheless.

  "I can't do this," he said. He let himself fall forward until the receded peninsula of dark hair touched her gelled Flock of Seagulls platinum flip. It seemed like the best posture for sharing grief, this forehead lean, and it reminded him of standing drunkenly at a urinal and falling forward until his head hit the wall. Despair.

  "You're doing fine," Jane said. "Nobody's good at this. "

  "What the fuck's a shivah?"

  "I think it's that Hindu god with all the arms. "

  "That can't be right. The Goldsteins are going to sit on it with me. "

  "Didn't Rachel teach you anything about being Jewish?"

  "I wasn't paying attention. I thought we had time. "

  Jane adjusted baby Sophie into a half-back, one-armed carry and put her free hand on the back of Charlie's neck. "You'll be okay, kid. "

  Seven," said Mrs. Goldstein. "Shivah means 'seven. ' We used to sit for seven days, grieving for the dead, praying. That's Orthodox, now most people just sit for three. "

  They sat shivah in Charlie and Rachel's apartment that overlooked the cable-car line at the corner of Mason and Vallejo Streets. The building was a four-story brick Edwardian (architecturally, not quite the grand courtesan couture of the Victorians, but enough tarty trim and trash to toss off a sailor down a side street) built after the earthquake and fire of 1906 had leveled the whole area of what was now North Beach, Russian Hill, and Chinatown. Charlie and Jane had inherited the building, along with the thrift shop that occupied the ground floor, when their father died four years before. Charlie got the business, the large, double apartment they'd grown up in, and the upkeep on the old building, while Jane got half the rental income and one of the apartments on the top floor with a Bay Bridge view.

  At the instruction of Mrs. Goldstein, all the mirrors in the house were draped with black fabric and a large candle was placed on the coffee table in the center of the living room. They were supposed to sit on low benches or cushions, neither of which Charlie had in the house, so, for the first time since Rachel's death, he went downstairs into the thrift shop looking for something they could use. The back stairs descended from a pantry behind the kitchen into the stockroom, where Charlie kept his office among boxes of merchandise waiting to be sorted, priced, and placed in the store.

  The shop was dark except for the light that filtered in the front window from the streetlights out on Mason Street. Charlie stood there at the foot of the stairs, his hand on the light switch, just staring. Amid the shelves of knickknacks and books, the piles of old radios, the racks of clothes, all of them dark, just lumpy shapes in the dark, he could see objects glowing a dull red, nearly pulsing, like beating hearts. A sweater in the racks, a porcelain figure of a frog in a curio case, out by the front window an old Coca-Cola tray, a pair of shoes - all glowing red.

  Charlie flipped the switch, fluorescent tubes fired to life across the ceiling, flickering at first, and the shop lit up. The red glow disappeared. "Okaaaaaaay," he said to himself, calmly, like everything was just fine now. He flipped off the lights. Glowing red stuff. On the counter, close to where he stood, there was a brass business-card holder cast in the shape of a whooping crane, glowing dull red. He took a second to study it, just to make sure there wasn't some red light source from outside refracting around the room and making him uneasy for no reason. He stepped into the dark shop, took a closer look, got an angle on the brass cranes. Nope, the brass was definitely pulsing red. He turned and ran back up the steps as fast as he could.

  He nearly ran over Jane, who stood in the kitchen, rocking Sophie gently in her arms, talking baby talk under her breath.

  "What?" Jane said. "I know you have some big cushions down in the shop somewhere. "

  "I can't," Charlie said. "I'm on drugs. " He backed against the refrigerator, like he was holding it hostage.

  "I'll go get them. Here, hold the baby. "

  "I can't, I'm on drugs. I'm hallucinating. "

  Jane cradled the baby in the crook of her right arm and put a free arm around her younger brother. "Charlie, you are on antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, not acid. Look around this apartment, there's not a person here that's not on something. " Charlie looked through the kitchen pass-through: women in black, most of them middle-aged or older, shaking their heads, men looking stoic, standing around the perimeter of the living room, each holding a stout tumbler of liquor and staring into space.

  "See, they're all fucked up. "

  "What about Mom?" Charlie nodded to their mother, who stood out among the other gray-haired women in black because she was draped in silver Navaho jewelry and was so darkly tanned that she appeared to be melting into her old-fashioned when she took a sip. r />
  "Especially Mom," Jane said. "I'll go look for something to sit shivah on. I don't know why you can't just use the couches. Now take your daughter. "

  "I can't. I can't be trusted with her. "

  "Take her, bitch!" Jane barked in Charlie's ear - sort of a whisper bark. It had long ago been determined who was the Alpha Male between them and it was not Charlie. She handed off the baby and cut to the stairs.

  "Jane," Charlie called after her. "Look around before you turn on the lights. See if you see anything weird, okay?"

  "Right. Weird. "

  She left him standing there in the kitchen, studying his daughter, thinking that her head might be a little oblong, but despite that, she looked a little like Rachel. "Your mommy loved Aunt Jane," he said. "They used to gang up on me in Risk - and Monopoly - and arguments - and cooking. " He slid down the fridge door, sat splayed-legged on the floor, and buried his face in Sophie's blanket.

  In the dark, Jane barked her shin on a wooden box full of old telephones. "Well, this is just stupid," she said to herself, and flipped on the lights. Nothing weird. Then, because Charlie was many things, but one of them was not crazy, she turned off the lights again, just to be sure that she hadn't missed something. "Right. Weird. "

  There was nothing weird about the store except that she was standing there in the dark rubbing her shin. But then, right before she turned on the light again, she saw someone peering in the front window, making a cup around his eyes to see through the reflection of the streetlights. A homeless guy or drunken tourist, she thought. She moved through the dark shop, between columns of comic books stacked on the floor, to a spot behind a rack of jackets where she could get a clear view of the window, which was filled with cheap cameras, vases, belt buckles, and all manner of objects that Charlie had judged worthy of interest, but obviously not worthy of a smash-and-grab.

  The guy looked tall, and not homeless, nicely dressed, but all in a single light color, she thought it might be yellow, but it was hard to tell under the streetlights. Could be light green.

  "We're closed," Jane said, loud enough to be heard through the glass.

  The man outside peered around the shop, but couldn't spot her. He stepped back from the window and she could see that he was, indeed, tall. Very tall. The streetlight caught the line of his cheek as he turned. He was also very thin and very black.

  "I was looking for the owner," the tall man said. "I have something I need to show him. "

  "There's been a death in the family," Jane said. "We'll be closed for the week. Can you come back in a week?"

  The tall man nodded, looking up and down the street as he did. He rocked on one foot like he was about to bolt, but kept stopping himself, like a sprinter straining against the starting blocks. Jane didn't move. There were always people out on the street, and it wasn't even late yet, but this guy was too anxious for the situation. "Look, if you need to get something appraised - "

  "No," he cut her off. "No. Just tell him she's, no - tell him to look for a package in the mail. I'm not sure when. "

  Jane smiled to herself. This guy had something - a brooch, a coin, a book - something that he thought was worth some money, maybe something he'd found in his grandmother's closet. She'd seen it a dozen times. They acted like they've found the lost city of Eldorado - they'd come in with it tucked in their coats, or wrapped in a thousand layers of tissue paper and tape. (The more tape, generally, the more worthless the item would turn out to be - there was an equation there somewhere. ) Nine times out of ten it was crap. She'd watched her father try to finesse their ego and gently lower the owners into disappointment, convince them that the sentimental value made it priceless, and that he, a lowly secondhand-store owner, couldn't presume to put a value on it. Charlie, on the other hand, would just tell them that he didn't know about brooches, or coins, or whatever they had and let someone else bear the bad news.

  "Okay, I'll tell him," Jane said from her cover behind the coats.

  With that, the tall man was away, taking great praying-mantis strides up the street and out of view. Jane shrugged, went back and turned on the lights, then proceeded to search for cushions among the piles.

  It was a big store, taking up nearly the whole bottom floor of the building, and not particularly well organized, as each system that Charlie adopted seemed to collapse after a few weeks under its own weight, and the result was not so much a patchwork of organizational systems, but a garden of mismatched piles. Lily, the maroon-haired Goth girl who worked for Charlie three afternoons a week, said that the fact that they ever found anything at all was proof of the chaos theory at work, then she would walk away muttering and go out in the alley to smoke clove cigarettes and stare into the Abyss. (Although Charlie noted that the Abyss looked an awful lot like a Dumpster. )

  It took Jane ten minutes to navigate the aisles and find three cushions that looked wide enough and thick enough that they might work for sitting shivah, and when she returned to Charlie's apartment she found her brother curled into the fetal position around baby Sophie, asleep on the kitchen floor. The other mourners had completely forgotten about him.

  "Hey, doofus. " She nudged his shoulder with her toe and he rolled onto his back, the baby still in his arms. "These okay?"

  "Did you see anything glowing?"

  Jane dropped the stack of cushions on the floor. "What?"

  "Glowing red. Did you see things in the shop glowing, like pulsating red?"

  "No. Did you?"

  "Kind of. "

  "Give 'em up. "

  "What?"

  "The drugs. Hand them over. They're obviously much better than you led me to believe. "

  "But you said they were just antianxiety. "

  "Give up the drugs. I'll watch the kid while you shivah. "

  "You can't watch my daughter if you're on drugs. "

  "Fine. Surrender the crumb snatcher and go sit. "

  Charlie handed the baby up to Jane. "You have to keep Mom out of the way, too. "

  "Oh no, not without drugs. "

  "They're in the medicine cabinet in the master bath. Bottom shelf. "

  He was sitting on the floor now, rubbing his forehead as if to stretch the skin out over his pain. She kneed him in the shoulder.

  "Hey, kid, I'm sorry, you know that, right? Goes without saying, right?"

  "Yeah. " A weak smile.

  She held the baby up by her face, then looked down in adoration, Mother of Jesus style. "What do you think? I should get one of these, huh?"

  "You can borrow mine whenever you need to. "

  "Nah, I should get my own. I already feel bad about borrowing your wife. "

  "Jane!"

  "Kidding! Jeez. You're such a wuss sometimes. Go sit shivah. Go. Go. Go. "

  Charlie gathered the cushions and went to the living room to grieve with his in-laws, nervous because the only prayer he knew was "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep," and he wasn't sure that was going to cut it for three full days.

  Jane forgot to mention the tall guy from the shop.