I can't help it.
Buried inside of me, maybe above my heart, is a magnet with an irresistible attraction to his street. No matter how hard I try to walk in a straight line, his room, his apartment building pulls me toward it, tugs at me like boys yanking on the pig-tails of little girls. Usually, I don't try to fight it. Usually I let myself end up watching his window – ground floor, third room to the left – from across the street, and playing with the possibilities.
...It would be so easy sometimes.
Most nights, the attraction fades, like old black and white photographs, and I walk home with the night as a muffler. As a gag. It suppresses all of the withered ideas I planted in front of Amir's apartment and keeps them hidden from the rest of the world.
Today, though, I came here on purpose.
I came here to think, because my intentions are confused. Because I don't know where I'm going anymore. And being here will help me incubate some new thoughts.
The sun is coming out. It's like God has taken a penny to the scratch-it lotto card of the sky and is revealing another no-win; muddy and sick, he can't redeem that for nothing. I light up a cigarette (I cough before I do, which makes me smile) and I watch his window which glows like a ceiling decorated with fake constellations.
A car pulls into the parking lot and sits there idling for a moment and I breathe out a mouthful of smoke. Then the engine is killed. It sputters and wheezes and Amir shoves the door open, jumps to his feet, and slams his fist against the hood of the car. His voice is sharp and ragged as he screams,
“Get out the car, you whore! Get out!”
He starts moving around the the passenger side.
Obviously he is drunk, his steps unsteady and confused as if the parking lot had suddenly metamorphosized into a water bed. The air picks cotton out of his breath. Big boles of it that float skyward.
The passenger door cracks open as he slams his fist against the hood again and Heather steps out. Even from this distance, I can see that she is crying, her hands fluttering, trembling like white laundry hung out to dry and as she turns away from Amir and in my directions, I can see that her blouse is partially unbuttoned so that her bra is exposed. I feel myself blush a little, mostly for her sake.
The bra is all white and lacy, like spider eggs laid in attic corners.
“I give you everything I got, hon! Every last bit and I do everything to make me happy and you still flinch! You're still cold! Godssakes, is there someone else? Is that it? And you just don't have the spine to tell me? Look at me! Look at me!”
Amir yanks her around (the air is frantically picking his cotton breath, as fast as fingers possibly can) and his eyes are opened so wide. So wide that you can almost see his soul through them, even this far away. He raises his hand to hit her and Heather cowers, flinches. He shakes his head.
He starts laughing.
Her lipstick and mascara are all smeared on her face, as messy as miscarriages in bathroom stalls and she cries harder, sliding down the car until she is sitting on the pavement. Amir just shakes his head again and walks up the stairs leading to his apartment. Pausing, he turns around.
“It doesn't have to be like this, hon,” he says.
She doesn't say a word.
She just sits there with her whole body fluttering like the red cape of a Spanish bull-fighter.
I've got this ash taste in my mouth now that won't go away and every particle of my being screams to be at her side, holding her hand (so cold, so cold) and whispering words into her ears that will heal all the gashes that Amir has made on her insides. I'm feeling a strange cocktail of emotions. Mostly, I just want to find the man who fishes dead bodies out of steel rivers and get the pawn shop gun back.
Mostly, I just want see how fast Amir's confidence flees with a gun pointed between his eyes.
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Joseph and Liesel were absolutely silent as they ate.
The television was on in the other room, quiet, like lonely words whispered while knelt in front of a gravestone, and the glasses that clinked and the forks that clattered against Liesel's porcelain plates talked as loud as deaf grandmothers. Charlie felt the silence running up and down his body, real and physical and he shivered as he chased his food around his plate.
The mashed potatoes were plowed snowdrifts.
Charlie couldn't get the pretty girl on the bus out of his head. She had pushed the broken girl at the hospital out and he tried to fill up all the quiet with the conversations they had together on the bus. The words weren't fake and dead like Liesel's or Joseph's or Mrs. Gelsinger's. They were the first real words that had been spoken in his direction since the day evil men and cancer flew overhead in a Canadian geese v-formation, honking deafeningly.
Not the big greasy New York, the old New York.
Charlie dropped his fork on accident and Joseph and Liesel's heads jerked up and they gave him looks as sharp as the plastic noses of America's Sweethearts.
The television whispered behind them.
It whispered like terrorists uttering prayers before guiding airplanes into skyscrapers.
Things get better.
You get over it.
***
That night, Charlie dreamed about his mother.
***
She did Middle Eastern belly-dances with face-veils of fire and talked to him about the danger of making friends with loneliness. Charlie noticed for the first time her hands were brown and chapped and that her lips were cracked mud that the words she spoke to him chaffed her mouth like dirty shoes wiped on 'welcome' mats.
The thunder outside killed flies between its palms.
***
The next day was Saturday.
Joseph was worked all day every weekend and Liesel was playing poker with the women on the block next door. And because she and Joseph didn't trust him alone in the house anymore, Charlie had been exiled to the backyard.
He sat on the porch steps and watched as leaves pursued each other across the ground and as a stray cat – all skinny with a stomach as flat as the chests of twelve year old girls – slinked across the yard. Her fur was matted and filthy and the slightest sound made her crouch and turn into a shadow, like the silhouettes of people standing up in front of the projector at movie theaters.
Charlie let his mind wander.
Somewhere in the distance, he heard chain-link fences tittering and the sound of baseballs and aluminum bats and kids screaming and kids yelling. The sound was a friendly one. It was also out of place and lonely and strangely amplified, like footsteps in cathedrals with vaulted ceilings.
The sound was close and Charlie imagined that he could probably walk there and back without Liesel noticing. He wanted to refamiliarize himself with the stitches in a baseball, even if it was from a distance.
He wanted to see the pretty girl who had sat next to him on the bus again.
Maybe she would be there.
Charlie got to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, and shuffled his way around the house, walking through leaf piles that crunched underfoot. He turned onto the sidewalk and wondered if he could still catch a baseball or if he had forgotten how. He wondered if her could still hold a bat and whistle using his two index fingers hooked inside his cheeks.
Could he still spit, the same as major league players chewing tobacco so that juices dribbled down his chin? Could he spit like he belonged on the face of a Wheaties box?
Seven houses down from Liesel and Joseph's was an empty lot cluttered with pop cans and old tires and even an overturned shopping cart in pale, crisp grass, like the buzz cut of a military officer. Several kids had cleared the junk to the perimeter, had thrown together a couple of bases, and were playing baseball. None of them saw Charlie as he watched from the sidewalk. The pretty girl who had sat beside him on the bus was not there, but the beautiful boy was, and he was up to bat.
His eyes were all screwed up with concentration and his body was tense and rigid like corpses that have been left out in the open too long. Everyone's faces were red, as if the cold was giving them kisses that left behind lipstick smears and a couple of the boys in the outfield were pitching words and taunts and jeers at him:
“C'mon Amir! Did the ragheads teach you how to hit a baseball? Huh? Or just how to pray?”
“We wanna batter, not a broken ladder!”
“Swing, bastard, swing!”
The words slid down of his face like the fingers of blind women feeling over their daughters' noses and mouths and cheeks. He just smiled. The same smile that he had given to Charlie on the playground and hissed,
“Give it to me, sharmoota.”
The pitcher wound his arm up, lunged, and let the ball spin toy tops in Amir's direction.
Amir swung.
Bat hit ball.
The sound was like a can of Coca-Cola snapping open and the ball painted an arc across the sky, whistled something like the middle-aged woman in the hospital (dying, dying) and thumped to the ground a couple feet from Charlie, at the edge of the lot.
Everyone turned.
Their eyes were stickers – Rome! Paris! Singapore! – plastered to his face as it were some big, travel suitcase and no one moved. Without the friendly sound of the baseball game, the sky, all miserable and gray, moved in a little closer and began smothering everyone's faces again. Charlie looked at the ball and then looked back at the kids with staring eyes.
They expected him to pick it up.
“Hey kid!” someone yelled, “Mind throwing us the ball?”
Charlie paused, glanced at Amir, and then made his way over to the baseball. Slowly, he picked it up and felt its skin. It was cold and smooth, like the head of a tiny aborted babies in a doctor's hands and at the same time it was rough and warm. Warm with all the life the kids were breathing into it. It was hard for the sky, Charlie could tell, to infect this baseball.
“Come on!”
Charlie tossed the ball to nobody in particular and sent half of the boys scrambling and swearing. The pitcher – who had a pale, transparent face, like counterfeit dollar bills being held up to lamp light – nodded at Amir and gestured toward first base.
“Home run, man. Take a walk.”
Amir began jogging around the bases, blowing white clouds of steam in front of his face like chewing gum bubbles, and Charlie put his hands back in his pockets and watched. Slowing, Amir stepped on second base, which was closest to Charlie and then stopped.
He turned towards Charlie.
Winked.
And spat at his feet.
Pro-league spit.
“Don't come back, kid. No face, no service.”
And he kept jogging.
A/N: I can't wait for you guys to read Chapter 13.
