Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Rules

Hours before the others awoke Felix could no longer stand pretending to sleep but was afraid to awaken them by getting up. Weak sun filtered by the blinds filled the room. He watched them snore quietly away and took On the Road from his bag but there wasn’t enough light to read easily and his eyes wandered. What he really wanted was coffee, but without a key he couldn’t leave.

The city was stirring awake, the late night agony giving way to bike horns and the honks of trucks. These were only distantly familiar sounds, more a part of old movie soundtracks. He had spent his early childhood in the city, uptown, when his mother was doing her residency at Mt. Sinai. There was a bedrock of sounds and smells then. But by the time he was seven they had moved to Yonkers, into a two-bedroom apartment in a luxury high rise. Then the city became a place to visit. His mother sometimes took him in to shop in the department stores for designer clothes, clothes she didn’t wear except for rare official functions. Or there were theater and ballet performances, the opera and museums. He remembered the rundown dioramas of the Museum of Natural History, poorly lit by lanterns. There was something dutiful about these trips. They were always with his mother or the mother of a friend. They ate hot dogs and drank cartons of weak orange juice and pressed their faces against the window of the amphibatrain as it dove into the river and raced along. When his parents were in town together they took him to ball games at the coliseum on the west side. He saw Smitty pitch a perfect game in ‘49; a man behind him burned his neck with cigar ashes when he stood to roar with the crowd for the 16th strike out and final out of the game.

But listening to the madmen and women rant in the hours before dawn, the constant yow of sirens rising and dropping, reminded him of their apartment on 105th street. How he loved sitting by the open window with Veronica and a cup of coffee watching the people below. It seemed like all they did was fuck and talk and shower. He remembered the hot street smell, even in winter, of sewage and garbage and brackish water, of burning alcohol beaten into the room by fan blades. Even the smell of rot and insanity was young. That was all that was left of their life now, memories. They had only begun to know each other. She had left right in the middle of things. All that they had yet to learn of themselves and each other and the world, all those future memories would never be made now. And it pissed him off to think about how she had just abandoned him to it, this life that they had been making together the way a spider makes its web, time and strands flung across an empty space, built of feelings and sensations and memories. Like spiders they spun their mental habitat to trap their sustenance, the food of others entering their lives.

Around noon Promethea stirred awake. She lay there staring at the ceiling through half open eyes, blinking. He didn’t mean to stare but he did. She stood and the blanket fell away from her body. Then she drifted off into the bathroom. The toilet flushed and she returned in a black silk bathrobe and noticed that he was awake. “Oh, good morning Felix,” she said, louder than he would have.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he whispered.

“Don’t mind them. They’ll sleep through anything.”

“That’s not true,” Peter groaned, folding his head in the pillow.

“He’s not even awake,” said Promethea. “Pay him no mind.” She turned and went into the kitchen calling, “Would you like a cuppa?”

Felix followed her into the kitchen. It was a narrow short room. To the right was a window, propped open by a stick, with a soot clogged screen, and to the left were a sink, a bar fridge and two burners along the wall. She boiled water in a dented steel pot and poured it into a glass beaker over the coffee grounds. The strong smell diffused in the air and she handed him a chipped purple mug full of steaming coffee. There was no room for cream and she didn’t offer any sugar. The space was tight and they stood practically touching. This nearness was unnerving to him and yet she appeared to be totally relaxed. “I’ll go out for croissants,” she said.

“Can I come with you?” The coffee was hot and dark, darker than he’d ever had it, smoky. They stepped back into the room and sat down together on her bed.

“Oh, don’t bother. It’s only a few blocks. The coffee’s not too strong I hope?” she asked. “Guests sometimes complain. I can water it down–”

“Don’t worry. It’s fine. I don’t want to impose on you. You don’t even know me.”

“Peter knows you,” she said.

Felix shook his head and looked at his bare feet. They were not far from hers. “I’m just a customer.”

“Oh nonsense. He wouldn’t have invited you if you weren’t o.k.”

Felix blushed. They balanced the cups on their knees. Her toenails were painted green and black and the polish was chipped. The toes were short and curled. Her lower legs had a sparse covering of black hair that thickened near her ankles. The window shades were bright and the traffic noise had reached its midday pitch, where it remained, a constant roar punctuated by squeaking gears, crunching metal and thuds.

Felix confessed, “He found me passed out in the rain.”

Promethea smiled. “So you lost your job, your house. Mind my asking what you’re going to do?”

There was a knock on the door and it opened. From beneath the pillows Peter said, “Go away.”

A tall, skinny man squeezed into the room and filled it with a big laugh. A pair of silver framed, round glasses rested on his nose, white against his nearly black skin. “But I haven’t had my coffee yet,” he said. His accent was very distinctive, one Felix knew from a couple of summers spent with his father in Detroit, shoring up the waterworks.

Promethea got up and said, “I’ll get you a cuppa. Felix, this is Edsel. Edsel, Felix.” She nodded in mock seriousness and swished into the kitchen, the long, chaotic curls of her hair shaking over the black silk.

“Hi Felix.” Edsel extended his hand and looked Felix over. “My, but you are crowded this morning.” He shook a cigarette out and lit up. “The boys were busy last night,” he said, a little louder, leaning back against the door gulping coffee.

Promethea blinked seriously and asked, “What happened?”

“They shot someone at three this morning on my corner. Then the police came.”

“Who was it?”

“Just some man angry about some woman. You know. This couple is walking down the street and her ex comes up from behind and shoots ‘em both, bang, in the backada head. Then the police have to come and chase the shooter around, which frankly I can’t explain. They caught him over on Ninth trying to–get this–swim the canal!”

“Eeeew,” she sang.

“But that’s not all. It was that section they just flushed with ScatAway.”

“Uh!”

“That’s right. What a mess. There was nothing left to pull out.”

Peter sat up in a muss of sleep. “What time is it?”

Edsel said with a knowing, mocking smile, “It’s one o’clock Mr. Nguyen. Don’t you have to be somewhere?”

“It’s my day off,” he groaned, squinting and swallowing.

“I know that.” Edsel tapped ashes onto the floor and rubbed them into the carpet. “Ain’t you got an audition?” he asked in a backcountry drawl.

“Use a bloody ashtray!” Promethea said.

“Oh–“another, more guttural groan–“Mark fucking Twain.”

“Well call it Death on the Mississippi if you don’t make it,” Edsel said.

Peter stood and went to the bathroom. Promethea handed Edsel an ashtray.

“What brings you among us, Felix? Are you a distant relative, country mouse come to visit our mansion full of cats?”

“He’s a friend of Peter’s,” Promethea said, almost matriarchally protective. “From Les Jardeen.”

Edsel nodded. “Any more coffee?”

“I’ll make another pot.”

Edsel pointed at the lump in the blankets with his forehead. “Still wrapped in his winding sheet, dead to the world. O, Moises–Edsel to Moises.” There was no response. “What was he drinking last night?”

“Gin,” Promethea shouted from the kitchen. “We watched Zeke’s orgy.”

“That old faggot is still at it. Who would believe.”

“You’re just jealous,” said Moises from under the blanket.

“Jealous? Of what?” Edsel asked, hands on hips.

“Everything.” Moises sat up and scratched his head and yawned. “His looks, his stamina–”

“Well, you know I’m not the jealous one around here,” he said in a lower, slightly indignant voice. Moises looked at the bathroom, hissed, and mouthed shut the fuck up.

“Boys, boys!” Promethea handed each of them a mug of coffee.

Moises lit up followed by Promethea and then Edsel till the room grew milky with smoke. For a while Felix followed the banter, grateful to be taken out of his own head but the coffee made him stir crazy and his stomach hissed with hunger. When there was a pause he said, “Shall I go get the croissants?”

“Oh, I forgot,” Promethea said. “You stay here, I’ll go.” She shed the robe and pulled on a pair of pants and a white blouse, which she buttoned halfway so that the black cups of her bra showed. Felix insisted on accompanying her and they descended together the twelve floors to the street. Without the glow of lanterns and the nighttime commerce it was quite different. The daylight revealed all of the junk and litter and filth. Balled paper, bags of rained-on clothes, smashed take-out containers full of chicken bones and buns smeared with ketchup and mud; there were dirty diapers and coils of fresh steaming shit. Every few blocks was a dumpster heaped with uncollected garbage, construction material, the refuse from demo jobs jagged and high, but mostly it was moldering garbage. Eighth Avenue had no canal or mass transit, it was a major thoroughfare. They walked quickly downtown and Promethea was very graceful at dodging vile, threatening things. Felix picking his way through the alien obstacle course, fearful of stepping in shit or bumping into a person. The people were everywhere and they seemed to barrel along oblivious to them. But the oblivion wasn’t reassuring. If it broke, he felt that most anyone would take his life. There was a uniformity of expression, a sort of dark, furrowed, hard attitude in the face and shoulders. Even the old had a predatory aura. Yet Promethea almost danced along. Why didn’t they notice her? It was the grace of nativity, that was all. Probably he couldn’t see the pinched mean look of her face. It was a mask, a projection, like a skunk’s stink or a urinating toad.

Even in school he had never come to midtown. Their haunt was upper Manhattan, Harlem, Inwood. They spent their free time hiking in Cloister Forest or hanging out in the bookstores and nightclubs on Amsterdam Ave., the restaurants of Broadway. Midtown was a world apart. And in those days the neighborhoods were still largely cut off from each other, canals acting as moats. There were colonies of rich people in the east fifties and sixties, a middle class enclave in the old village, student ghettos around Washington Square and uptown where he and Veronica lived.

As they walked along his sense of danger became acute, it stabbed at the air and agitated his bowels. He felt like Promethea was in danger. The complexion of the street became cinematic, it shaded off into the grainy texture of late night movies about gangs raping and dismembering lost women, of long torture sessions in trash filled warehouses. Historical fiction, old Hollywood movies, television shows from the last century played before his eyes and he felt a suspense that wasn’t real, a fear rooted in art, as if he had wandered out into space and found a race of demons.

Promethea strode on unconcerned. They passed men in rags. Even the words men in rags were evocative. Men in rags stood on the banks of the Ganges, ribs like picket fences, enveloped in the smoke of burning pyres. This is not a movie, he thought. This is not the Ganges. They were the color of scarred concrete. And as he walked, he looked down and saw how they had literally blended in like chameleons. The sidewalks were the original sidewalks, eroded down to a sort of immobile rubble kept in place by dirt and shit. In the interstices and cracks little weeds grew. He glanced up alleys and side streets and on these less trafficked thoroughfares huge tufts of grass grew in coarse, tough clumps, a metre or two tall, traps for drifting trash. The men in rags were as if wrapped in fraying mummy cloth. Their skin was scabbed, and their faces old, their eyes hollowed out of thick, diseased skin like bark, their lips slack in sleep.

A man dressed all in green pushed a nineteenth century baby pram up the middle of Eighth Avenue, with a large dog in it, oblivious to the delivery vans honking their horns and veering around him like water divided by a rock in a stream. The dog was more alert than the man was and yet immobile, elite, above the fray in his canine certainty. They passed a store on a block of locked abandoned buildings selling junk. The owner was screaming at a boy and Felix winced at the harsh, loud abuse, feeling the boy’s heart race with shame and hatred. Next there was a man slapping a woman across the face. She had no shirt on and her brown breasts were like pastry bags swaying against her belly, her wide, asymmetrical face swollen and bloody but defiant as she shrieked back at him a string of inscrutable abuse.

They crossed Eighth Avenue, dodging traffic, fleeing the irate horns, and headed over to Ninth on 33rd Street. 33rd was quiet, less desperate. The stoops were intact. Old people stood sentinel before their buildings. The windows of the tenements were shuttered by thick composite grills bolted onto the brick.

The amphibatrain ran on Ninth in the canal. There were more stores. The buildings were a typical mix of 25 story ceramic structures built during the reclamation, like the one Peter and Promethea and Moises lived in, and old tenements. But the bustle here was different. There was a robust, urban quality to it, less desperate, less incongruous. On Eighth Avenue the few stores sold things no one would ever buy. They bought and sold things merely to do something; the weird commercial projects of superannuated humans, determined to persist in a form without content. The real trade there was the perpetual market in bodies, drugs and gambling. Murder for hire. Weapons. Ninth Avenue was full of food stores, bakeries, fruit stands, butchers, grocers. Farther south was a wholesale goods district.

Felix was out of breath. His hangover, not really noticeable as he was lying on the bed and drinking coffee, had flared up. He had not slept properly in weeks, could hardly keep any food down, and his whole body felt like a sponge full of gin and cheap vodka. His mouth tasted like he had mopped a floor with it. Images floated like mirage water before him, of storefronts, of pyramids of blood oranges and limes and apples, of squat old people with pasty skin smoking leisurely against composite railings.

Promethea, always a step ahead, stopped in front of a grimy, nondescript storefront between 33rd and 32nd. “This is it,” she said. “Better than Paris.”

“You’ve been to Paris?”

“I left London when I was seventeen and settled there to go to art school. Fancied myself a real bohemian,” she laughed. “Then I got pregnant by this little French Algerian dog named Memphis. He seduced me by telling me he was the reincarnated spirit of Cheops, emperor of Egypt. Don’t tell me Egypt never had an emperor, I was stupid then. After the abortion I tried to kill myself and this busybody Yank, who claimed to be a theater producer, picked me up off my ass and flew me to New York. That fell through of course. He was just another butt sniffing dog looking for a cheap fuck.”

They entered the little place, Boulangerie Swisse and took their place on line behind two shriveled up old people, a man with a bag on his head counting out coins into the filthy palm of a woman. The floors and walls were dirty and the ceiling was covered in dead fly grease. A fan clanked in the transom. There were cats all over the place, two seated on the ledge by the window, a tail swishing back and forth under the display case, one running across the floor, another brushing between their legs. A moist, yeasty smell and the ghost of slightly charred bread crust filled the hot room.

“They have the best bread,” she mumbled. “And they’re cheap.

They used to live in Viet Nam. All the rich folks come here after work. Sundays it’s ramming. You’ll see.”

They stepped up to the tall glass case. On the back wall were slanted shelves piled high with assorted breads, volkhornbrot, pumpernickel raisin, seeded Jewish rye, enormous corn loaves, ciabattas, batards, country sour dough rounds, baguettes. In the case were brioche, bagels, bialys, donuts, croissants, cheese danish, poppy seed cake, muffins. An aproned man, dusty with flour, sleepy and white headed, moving like one of the cats, was stocking the composite trays on the shelves with loaves out of giant brown paper sacks. The woman had an ageless, unflappable face, lips pressed together without a smile, eyes skeptical and inquiring. She stared at Felix and Promethea and said nothing.

Promethea ordered six croissants and opened a black shoulder bag that Felix had not noticed her wearing.

“No,” Felix said. Promethea looked at him warily. “I’ll get these. It’s the least I can do, no?” Then to the woman he said, “I’ll take one of those dark breads.”

The Woman shrugged and said in a thick accent, “Which one young man?”

Felix laughed at the thought of being called a young man. He felt the pressure of surrounding impatience. “What do you like?” he asked Promethea.

“The pumpernickel raisin is brilliant.”

“I’ll take one of those and a challa bread please.”

Back on the street he asked, “Aren’t you afraid of walking around here alone?”

“No, not in the day, anyway.”

“Haven’t you been hurt? Don’t people like, get murdered all the time?”

She stopped abruptly. They were crossing over 33rd to Eighth. Other than the few old people on the stoops the street was empty. They faced each other. Her face was intense. He looked at her in the daylight. She had round dark eyes, almost black. Her thick lips, not stretched into a smile, were a little somber. The slight heaviness disappeared as he watched her. There was a cagey, unrevealing quality to her expression, which seemed to compete with an underlying melancholy. He could feel it, how it gave her strength, how it never failed her. Loss was her closest friend. And the paralyzing knot of nothingness, his inconsolable center was aligning with hers, there on the street, as they talked. She had something he needed and she was offering it to him, by impulse.

She patted her bag and opened it. “Look,” she said, a little impatiently, as if she were explaining the obvious. He looked. Next to her wallet and things was a gun. “Now, these are the rules. If they want your money, give it to them. Anything else, you take one with you.”

Felix’s face became numb. “But guns are illegal,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid?”

She laughed and punched him on the arm. “Where are you from, Felix?”

“Originally?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head and smiled. Her face became full again, her cheeks bloomed. “Whatever. Look, as I said, the rules. If it’s my money they want, fine. Anything else, forget about it. This,” she pointed vaguely at her body, “doesn’t get taken again.”

“Have you ever shot anyone?”

“Well, no. But I would. People are creeps. They have nothing. Nothing but the power of life and death. That’s free, or so they think. If they can make you beg for your life, imagine what that feels like.

You’re on your knees, crying, begging to live, you shit your pants, you sob and scream and no matter what it just makes them hate you more. The more you beg the more they want to kill you, see? But say you control yourself. Just imagine you’re a guy in a movie who can have a gun pointed at his face and it’s his last moment on earth and he doesn’t budge, doesn’t cry, he doesn’t even say fuck you. He just stares with pride and defiance, totally unmoved by death and life. Now that makes them really mad. Before they hated you because you were weak, but you were playing their game so they enjoyed it. But make a person like that mad, take away their power to terrify you, and you’re just as dead. You see? Either way you lose. But with this?” She took out the gun, waved it casually around and put it back. “Now we both have the power.”

Felix nodded slowly. He understood the rules. As they walked he took out a croissant and ate it. She was looking at him strangely, he thought. Did she imagine she knew him? What did she see? He was so diminished in his own eyes, so fearfully broken, he had no perspective. He couldn’t even tell if he were still feeling the effects of Paregane. He had not been to the garden in a long time. And his sleep, such as it was, was loud and bright. Veronica didn’t come to him in his dreams, he had no dreams. Rather, when he did sleep it was as if he were awake, talking to her, arguing with her, screaming at her in a brightly lit chaotic room full of roaring noises. The roaring noise was of a nearby but invisible vortex. It could one minute spew forth Pine Barons and AutoParks and the next suck down the works of Marlowe, Kyd and Shakespeare along with a dozen holographic aliases in chain mail with pikes and hammers.

Back in the apartment they had folded up the mattresses against the wall and taken out the black table. His had been deflated and returned to the cabinet. Two cigarettes sent up ribbons of smoke. Edsel reclined on one cushion, his long bony legs like sawhorses and Moises sat opposite him, bent over a glass mortar and pestle, in which he ground a white powder. They were arguing.

“Did Peter leave?” asked Promethea at the door. Felix squeezed by her and brought the bag of bread into the kitchen. He opened the cabinets above the sink and stove and found a plate.

“Finally,” Edsel said.

“God, I hope he gets this part,” Moises said, dipping a little silver spoon into the white powder and snorting it up his nose.

Edsel frowned. “I’d better be going.” Felix set the plate of croissants down on the table and stood in the kitchen doorway.

“What’s up later?’ Promethea asked.

“I’ll call.” Edsel looked Felix over and smiled. “It was very nice meeting you.” He shook his hand again and let it linger a moment, looking into Felix’s eyes. Edsel’s eyes had a comic spark that seemed to play off the edges of his iris but his expression was serious, almost wizened. Felix couldn’t guess his age. He seemed older than the others. His face was a little lined. But he also wanted something. They all did. “Are you staying for a while?”

Felix uttered a monosyllable and then, confusion passing, said, “I don’t think so.”

Edsel released Felix from his attention and said to all of them, “Well, I’ll be seeing you for dinner then,” and left.

“Is there any hot water?” Promethea asked.

“Peter didn’t empty the tank,” Moises said in a tight voice.

“I’m popping in the shower then.”

Felix sat down where Edsel had been, took a croissant and asked, “What’s that you’re sniffing?” Promethea rifled a couple of drawers in the wall unit and groaned. Then she put her hand into the top layer of laundry but had second thoughts and headed into the bathroom. The lock made a loud click. As soon as the door was closed Moises turned on the tv and started to flip channels, one per second.

“It’s LBD,” he said, not taking his eyes from the screen, which was propped against the windows on a couple of composite blocks.

“What’s LBD?”

Moises shook his head vaguely and smiled. “Beats me. Every couple of months they change it. But it sure puts the day right.” He laughed and then moaned. His wavy chestnut hair hid his face. The muscles on his arms tensed as he crushed the controls. “All these stations and nothing to watch. Oh my god! Look at that dress. She must be two and a half meters.”

The woman strode into a black room and turned on the light. Her dress, a gossamer wrap of rubies, sparkled. “Growth hormones,” Felix said, vaguely. It was the kind of thing he would have said to Veronica on a Sunday afternoon as they sat flipping channels.

Moises shook his head. “That one’s genetic, I’m sure. Look at her legs.”

Felix looked at her legs. They were perfectly gorgeous and perfectly boring, chiseled out of muscle and bone, buffed and polished with light. “What about them?”

“Proportional. 9 times out if 10 growth hormones are disproportional. She’ll be making her million bucks back soon, her parent’s didn’t waste their money.”

“But paying off the contract, and the licensing fees–”

“Even so, she’s good.” Moises sighed. “That’s all they care about.” He looked at Felix with his pinned turquoise eyes and said, “You really are gorgeous you know.”

Felix was taken aback by the sudden intimacy. “I–”

“Don’t be embarrassed. Peter said you were beautiful but I had no idea. How did she die?”

That question would be impossible to avoid. It would come at him all the time now. The only escape was to leave human beings behind, to go into the forest somewhere and live the life of a hermit, in a loincloth. He would shave his head, renounce everything and walk to the Himalayas. Or shrink into a chamber of the past, go mad and never return. A cave in a primeval forest where he would die beneath the dripping canopy and be taken piecemeal by the ants and beetles into the belly of the earth. “Paregane, I think.”

Moises was momentarily transfixed in amazement. “She was on Paregane?”

“Yes. She’d had…. troubles. We were trying to put our life back together. Move to Alaska.”

“Alaska? She was on Paregane and you were going to live in Alaska? That is just so cool!” Moises’s face fell. “I’m sorry, that was stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.” He slapped his own cheek. “Bad!” he said and then he did it again, leaving behind a red mark. “Did she tell you what it was like?”

“It killed her.”

“But I mean, taking Paregane.”

Felix felt the room dissolve a little so his attention was no longer fixed upon any point. It wandered a bit and then, no longer a spectre but an emanation, diffused between past and present, earth and paradise, remembering the feeling of the garden. “It was beautiful,” he said. “I mean, we use the word beautiful all the time but this was different. When you sleep you go to paradise and then carry the feeling of beauty back with you and it lingers all through the day. Work, it just didn’t matter. Nothing did anymore, except for existence.”

“How do you know though? How do you know it really is paradise? People say it’s a garden.”

“You just feel so at home there. It’s like–well, you know how in spring, after the cold and rain, you get a sunny day? And there’s a breeze that seems to come from some far off place? It’s warm, and it smells sweet, of opening flowers, flowers you’ve never touched or smelled before but they are somehow familiar. And the light seems to be calling out the leaves and buds…. Have you ever been love? Those first few weeks? I felt so at peace. There was no yearning, no emptiness, no past or future. And I knew I was a part of everything, and everything was a part of me.”