Checker nodded, and reached out to touch the edge.
“Careful! Is vedy sharp.”
Rahim pulled Check forward and plumped his pillow. “You want you die so much, maybe I revenge, I don kill you. How you like that?”
Meanwhile, Checker’s expression had gone from unleavened dough to congealed salad, and looked headed for a slightly runny blancmange. None of these did Rahim count among his favorite foods. “You know, Hijack don have such good fun since last time he clean toilet bowl.”
Finally Rahim began to feel as angry as he’d planned to be when he first stalked in here. His best friend had turned from a dessert soufflé, a swirling zabaglione, a wild floating island, to this—tomato aspic, this—cornmeal mush, this—noodle casserole. Checker Secretti was an egg white at soft peak, a stiff whipped cream, yolks at lemon yellow, pound cake rising in the pan and splitting at the top. Checker Secretti was active yeast and a brand-new box of baking soda. He was the powdered sugar you sifted six times before folding it into the angel-food batter, so light that when you sneeze it flies all over the kitchen and you have to start again. Checker Secretti was burbling buttermilk biscuits and sugar syrup boiling over on the stove; a teakettle at high whistle, steam in the air. For two years Checker Secretti had been the icing on his cupcakes, the head on his beer. But now Rahim was looking at anything he’d ever made that disappointed—glutinous white sauce, lumpy curdled custard, fallen confections with dense layers of sad.
Rahim ground his sneaker in a semicircle on the linoleum. The rubber squeaked shrilly on the wax. “This is act, yes? When I leave here you play Danno on Late Show so loud and everyone dance and all the nurses fall in love with boy in 207?” His sneaker grabbed the tile, snarling. This time he leaned down and held the knife to Checker’s throat in earnest. “I see you with Syria, I so angry, but I don hate you. I want to so much and I try, but I still remember swimming pool and hundred-dollar peanut. But when Quiet Carl come in door of Plato and say—when he say you try drown yourself, Sheckair, I hate you so hard I can’t see. You hurt, well so? Think only you hurt? Think I don see my own brother cut in front of my eyes? Think Syria don hurt from her father, every, every day? This is good. You eat your pain. It is like cake, it is like butter. It is life as much as good times by river. You go bed with your pain like woman. You laugh with your pain like old friend. You think we feel sorry now? We don, we hate you. And we hate look at dumpling in hospital bed. So you don laugh, right this minute, I cut your throat in half.”
Checker stared at Rahim, down at the knife and back again. “Let me get this straight,” he croaked slowly, his voice dry from so little use. “You’ll spare me if I fuck your wife, but you’ll slit my throat if I won’t laugh?”
Well, yes, that was pretty much the size of it; Rahim pushed the blade tighter against Checker’s esophagus.
“Now that,” Check squeaked, “is funny.”
Rahim felt the sound rise under his knife. Nurses looked in the door. Rubber wheels squirreled to a halt. Checker’s comatose roommate sat up in bed, looking wide awake and even professorily cogent, though he was still sleeping off anesthesia. He scrutinized Checker, his eyes bright. “What is that?” he asked. “Is he laughing or crying?”
Rahim lifted the knife off his victim and stroked the drummer’s hair, the way Check had so often consoled him. “Is same,” Rahim told the other patient. “We say, No dark, no day. Your roommate here, I wait for he will understand. This drummer boy, he can be pretty stupid.” The Iraqi tugged his shirttail from Checker’s fingers. While so much wider and more scarred, in this weak light and fastened to another man, those hands weren’t so different from Rachel’s. Rahim pulled up a chair. “You save your life,” said the Iraqi softly, wiping the tears from Checker’s cheeks. “Now, for jump off bridge, I not so sure. But for what you do with Syria: I forgive you.”
Check sighed and collapsed back into his fluffed pillow. “Okay, Hijack. That’s the best revenge in the end, anyway. Cause let me tell you, being forgiven is a totally disgusting experience.”
“If I’d known suicide was such a good time, I would have tried it.”
“Nah,” said Checker. “Try it at your age, everyone figures you’re embezzling funds.”
The man who walked in the room was handsome and well, even sedately dressed, but with touches—a rebellious gleam in his black skin, a slyness to his pinstripe, a tie that only close up revealed a pattern of tiny red trumpets, a glint of diamond studs at his wrists—that showed something well covered but irrepressible. It shone through in the excessive, self-satisfied shine of his cordovans, the overly flashy design of his watch, and especially in the way he walked to Checker’s bed, as if he’d been training for years to walk that slowly, that close to the ground; as if even this short distance took discipline not to run. He had learned to walk the way he was supposed to, and to a casual observer he pulled it off. But Checker knew better, because Checker was his son.
Tyrone Secretti was a man who’d learned everything over again—to talk without getting off the subject, to sit at dinner and not play tunes on the tines of his fork. No, he went to four-star D.C. restaurants and muttered that the fish was overdone. He had learned to look bored; he had trained himself not to draw pictures on his Congressional Record. Strolling down the common of the Smithsonian, he did not take his shoes off, or balance on the rim of the reflecting pool. He stayed on walkways with his shiny cordovans and his careful imitation of a middle-aged man rushing somewhere important.
“I wanted to bring you a present. So I wondered, are you still friends with that Iraqi illegal?”
“Ask him. Hijack, this is my father.”
They shook hands.
“Well, it was a little difficult because your mother”—he rolled his eyes—“got the name wrong, but once I sorted that out—”
“I thought they were doing an investigation.”
“Investigation! The INS—” Tyrone laughed. “The computer was down, as always. But I managed to find one of those antiquities who could still work a typewriter.” He reached into his wallet and handed Rahim a card. “Technically you have to stay with your wife for two years to apply for citizenship. If you’d prefer not to do that, I can slip a bill through Congress that would naturalize you right away. That usually costs two or three thou, but those characters owe me a few favors.”
Rahim looked from the card to Tyrone as if his fairy godfather had just floated down from the sky. Then he looked at Checker. “Why—?”
Checker shrugged. “He wouldn’t do it before.”
“Don’t think jumping off a bridge is how to get your way with me,” said Tyrone severely. “But I decided I’d been too harsh.”
“I like the congressional idea,” said Checker. “It’s got style.”
“Listen, it’s gratifying to be effective, Check. I’m telling you, there’s a whole other level out there you haven’t touched—”
“So you’ve enrolled me in Yale and you’ve already marked the good poli sci profs in the catalogue.”
“I didn’t come here to argue—”
“You came here to lecture instead. Which is just an argument where I don’t get to talk.”
His father sighed. “Forget it.”
“You got Hijack his green card to impress me, didn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, good. I am impressed.”
They smiled. Truce. “So am I. I met a woman in the hall—”
“Syria. Did you like her?”
“She’s terrifying! And not too pleased with you at the moment.”
“Nobody is.”
“I sensed a—storm on the horizon. Man to man, I felt I should warn you.”
Rahim had been examining the card in his hand, its eerie waves of beige rippling through the photo like alien weapons on Star Trek, the long rows of inexplicable numbers, his own beloved fingerprint on the back. He realized he might be looking not only at entry into a new world but at his divorce papers. For such a t
hing he couldn’t bring himself to say thank you, so, twisting it in his hand half hoping it would break, he took leave of Checker and his father, saying, “Is not green!” and rushing out the door.
Alone, the two were uncomfortably silent. At last Tyrone mentioned, “It runs in the family, you know.”
“You make it sound like a disease.”
“An affliction, anyway.”
“This happens to you?”
“I’ve got a milder case—”
Checker gestured at the suit. “So I see.”
Tyrone paused. “I’ve never understood why you’re so angry at me.”
“Neither have I.”
“This problem—you can turn it to your advantage.”
“So far it hasn’t exactly been a lucky penny.”
“Your glassblower friend knew precisely what I meant. There are engines fueled by garbage, did you know that? You can even get energy out of manure.”
“I should run off my own shit?”
Tyrone shrugged. “Power is power.”
“I have a feeling we’re not talking about the same experience.”
“Why is it so important to you that we’re totally different? That I couldn’t possibly understand you?”
Checker smiled. “I’m nineteen.”
His father reached out and touched his leg. “See that you turn twenty, then.” Averting his face, he said goodbye hastily and bounded from the room.
He heard her talking to the cigarette man, the boots clomping on the resonant linoleum. He could sense when she leaned on the other side of the wall, smoking, though she’d quit years ago. The smoke would spiral past his open door. The longer she waited, the worse it would be.
She had something to tell him and was putting it off. Of course Checker could have predicted it. She was twenty-nine; she ran her own business. Though wearing thin in places, she still turned more than heads; he’d seen men stop and wheel in the street. And he was a kid. They’d flirted for months, and that builds up a certain tension. Right, she found him attractive. Finally they’d screwed; now it was awkward. And he’d gone and done this thing, which made it harder to blow him off. She’d have to be sensitive about it. That wasn’t her style.
At last she turned resolutely into the room, marching to his bed, looking at him with—he couldn’t even say. He realized he didn’t know her very well. What was that? Disdain? Compassion? Like an umpire: decision. He wanted desperately to influence her in some way, but the play was made. In perceiving how little he could do now, Checker reclined farther into his pillow. Helplessness can be curiously relaxing.
He asked for a cigarette. She neglected to point out he didn’t smoke, and flicked the lighter for him. Experimenting with his new prop, Checker felt as if he were in a movie. We are so cool, he thought. I’ll pay for this in a minute, but this is a riot.
Syria sat down and crossed her legs. She folded her hands in her lap and leaned her head back, closing her eyes. Checker looked down at his formless hospital gown with its unflattering square neckline and no longer felt cool. He would have paid a nurse hundreds of dollars at that moment just to retrieve his favorite red shirt.
“They say you’re talking again. I heard you laugh. It was nice.”
Now he just wanted her to get this over with. He said nothing.
“You always a zombie afterward?”
“Sometimes.”
“You snapped out just in time. This afternoon they’re deciding whether to release you to a shrink or throw you in a rubber room. Looks about fifty-fifty. And they want to see you with your mother. Seems they’d meet with the whole jolly family, but Tyrone’s headed back to D.C.”
“It’s sixty-forty for the rubber room, then. Unless they decide to cart her away instead.”
“Or me. When I checked you in, I said I was your mother.”
“Why?”
“So I could hang around overnight,” she confessed with gruff embarrassment.
“Well, no danger of running into Lena here,” he said sourly.
“Actually, she stopped by yesterday while you were asleep. I confused her at first, but she perked right up when I explained. All but handed over your baby pictures and bronzed booties. Told your roommate here she was your aunt. Ate it up, being your aunt. Frankly, kiddo, that’s no hundred-dollar bill you’ve got there. She’s retarded.”
Checker took a pull on his cigarette and concentrated on not coughing. “Now Hijack has his green card, you getting a divorce?”
She poured herself some water and tossed it down like a shot of Scotch. “You bet. Time to call an end to this whole shebang, Checko. Too fucked up.”
“Yeah…Hey, pour me some water, too?”
They each kept having to touch something.
“You remember jumping, Checko? The fall?”
“Sure. But I don’t know if I could describe it.”
“Try.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
“It took a long time,” he began. “There was a lot of wind, shooting up my nose and down my throat, cold—but otherwise it was like in an airplane. The air was big and stuffed, like a First Class recliner. I half expected a stewardess to come along midway to the river and offer me a complimentary cocktail.”
“What would you order?”
“Something special.” Checker leaned back. “A mimosa. I like the word…
“I looked around. Everything seemed, I don’t know, neat. The sun was rising. My eyes watered from the wind, but the tears cleared over my temples fast enough so I could still see. The park got all crisp, see, with the pool, and I thought, It’s so blue.
“Well, I thought about practically everything. Even you, a little…Till toward the last it was like the end of your flight, when you get restless and look at your watch and you’ve read all the magazines. Except I don’t get bored flying much. I fly to D.C. to see my dad, and I love taking off, pressing back in the seat; I love landing…” Checker’s voice died off. “Do you get sick of me saying how much I like stuff?”
Syria considered. “Not that I’ve noticed. But I guess if I had to listen to how great every goddamned thing was for the next fifty years I could get pretty sick of it.”
“But we’re not talking about the next fifty years, are we?”
“No,” she said casually. “We’re talking about jumping off a bridge. Go on. I’m interested.”
“Well, right as I hit the water I felt—” Checker squirmed. He wanted to get this right. “In Vesuvius,” he continued slowly, “when we—”
“Fucked.”
“The studio went all white. And on the cable, everything went black. But right when I hit the river everything went black and white at the same time.”
“Checkered.”
“Yeah! I was—bummed out of my mind and—jacked to the hilt. I’ve never felt anything like it. Sometimes I feel so good it hurts, you know that feeling? So it was like there was a knife in my back that was this sadness, and the other, the good pain, like a knife under my ribs, and the very tips of the blades met and clicked in the center of my body. Does that sound crazy?”
“Yep.”
Checker slumped. End of swan song. Weak applause. “Well, I tried.”
“I think you should work on some metaphors that don’t involve lethal weapons.”
Syria got up and paced around the small room, picking things up and then tossing them down again as if they’d done something to annoy her. “Listen,” she said, clawing into her hair, “we have to talk.”
“I guess I thought that’s what we were doing.”
“Yeah, well.” She stood with her hands in her pockets, her back to him. There will be a lot of disappointments. Toughen up. Checker looked over at Syria because he could swear she said that, but she was only looking out the window.
“You remember you went to see your friend Rachel here, and you were afraid to set her off again, so you told her something was possible that wasn’t? What did I say you should’ve done?”
/>
“Told the truth.”
“Because you can’t treat people like porcelain. They have to live in the world the way it really is, right?”
“Uh-huh,” said Checker dully.
“If they can’t take the way things are, they should go ahead and kill themselves, because you can’t make a whole other world for them, you can’t protect them, it’s too big a job, isn’t that right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I’m not likely to come in here, believing that, and tell you something you’d like to hear just because I don’t want you to do something crazy.”
“Sure,” said Check, his voice cracking a little. He cleared his throat. Relax, just keep your legs parallel, rest your palms sticky side down on the sheet. Let this go by. Listen and nod and take it, and wait very, very patiently for this to be over. She has to leave this room eventually, she’ll even want to.
“But I do want you to tell me,” she said, turning to look him straight in the eye. “If I say that you and I are a lousy idea and I’m not interested, what are you going to do?”
“I’m not going to kill myself, Syr,” he croaked, “if that’s what you mean.”
She sat down again. “Why did you jump off that bridge, Checko?”
“Hijack…Because Eat was right…”
“Yeah?” she said skeptically. “But without Chick-pea you’d have jumped because you burned your dinner or your geraniums died.” She leaned in closer. “It’s only that chickenshit crumpling of yours, isn’t it? And if you think I can save you, forget it. I have my own life and my own work and I expect you to take care of yourself. If you want to hang out in hospitals, I’m sorry—visiting hours are during my classes, got it? I need a man who can really fuck and really play drums and really wake up in the morning. If you’re not up to that, forget it.”
Checker looked a little dazed. “Forget what?”
Syria rolled her eyes with that huge, powerful irritation with which she felled benches and smashed glass off punties and poured barrels of cullet into the furnace mouth. “Forget marrying me, asshole.”
There was a long and awkward silence, during which Checker rehearsed back to himself her entire speech, and then farther back to everything before that, and only when he had run through this sequence three or four times did he allow himself a shy little smile. He flipped the sheet off and put his feet up on the railing, clasping his hands behind his head. “Maybe I don’t want anything more to do with you. Maybe I just wanted into your filthy jeans and that’s the end of it.”