stopped shaking.
Yes, his chosen profession had its bad days, even given its relative freedom. One of the worst parts, besides the premonitions, was running up against so many folks busy putting out dissatisfaction, or anger, or fear—all fueled by some surplus or absence of longing. Sonny had developed a theory about longing. In moderate doses, it was healthy, like a bit of salt sprinkled on a good meal. But too little meant a person had given up on life, while too much turned a body mad and desperate. If the passengers Sonny passed on any given day were filled with what he thought of as a longing imbalance, an anxious buzz began ringing in his ears. Sometimes he developed food-poisoning symptoms, turned dizzy and sick to his stomach. He wished he weren’t so sensitive, but there it sat.
Other drawbacks were more mundane. Train delays, for instance. Some were scheduled, such as track work. Others fell in his way unplanned, like four or five weeks ago, when somebody dropped with a heart attack on the subway train ahead of them, bringing them to a halt for a good half-hour. And there stood Sonny, trapped in a single car, tick-tock-tick-tock, leaning against a closed door, watching the newspaper-reader sigh and refold his pages, the mother rummage in her bag for something to keep the toddler quiet, the tiny Oriental woman close her eyes and lapse into delicate snoring. All the while, Sonny not collecting a dime.
Taken as a whole, though, it wasn’t bad work, with changing scenery and new folks along with the familiar faces. Those who spent most of their time aboveground didn’t realize how two-dimensional their world was. Besides, he didn’t have to serve people, and he didn’t have to answer to a boss. He hadn’t managed too well at any job with either of those requirements.
Sonny glanced out the subway window at the graffiti rushing past: illegible names, indecipherable drawings, puffy superhero writing. Warnings, all, from another world. It was still too early to clock in—practically no customers yet. He could make use of the premature wakeup call to go to his sister’s and take a shower, try to wash off his apprehensions along with the street dirt. It had been a week since his last shower, and staying clean was important in this job. A challenge, for sure, living and sleeping in rat territory, but if you started to smell bad, you got fewer handouts—or your salary dropped, as Sonny preferred to think of it. He’d seen it time and again, those poor suckers who allowed themselves to become rank on the way to becoming stupid. People shed liberal guilt, lost sympathy, turned away in disgust.
He liked his sister’s place, a third-floor walk-up in the Bowery, on a little side street that was so far resisting the neighborhood’s fix-up mood. Her husband, Leo, said they could afford better now and wanted to move, but Ruby was stuck on the area, and Sonny agreed. The Bowery was the city at its best—excepting, of course, for the subway. High-rise condos were on the way, no denying, but so far the fancy shops hadn’t crowded everything out. Poor people weren’t an extinct species yet. Still room for the occasional flophouse, under thirty bucks for a night, and where else on the island could you find that? ’Round the corner from Ruby’s, the Bowery Mission folks served up inspirational hymns and three meals a day, just like they had since the 1800s. Squeezed between a tattoo parlor and a restaurant-supply store sat Steve’s, a slop joint offering a cuppa for just a buck. If Sonny came in when the pot was near empty, they gave him the dregs for free, sometimes even throwing in a fresh roll. The people who spent four dollars for their coffee and needed choices of flavors and asked for soy milk instead of cream—those folks were farther uptown. In the Bowery, an outsider still felt at home. A bum could find a bed. And a passerby could still inhale the sweet scent of weed, come most nights. Bhang, an old Rasta had taught Sonny to call it, and though Sonny didn’t smoke himself, he did enjoy catching a whiff as he passed. The scent of freedom.
The only problem with his sister’s place was Leo. Leo felt ashamed to be related to someone in Sonny’s line of business and couldn’t keep that to himself. Sonny preferred to visit when Leo was out showing a client some overpriced condo or a fixer-upper, trying to persuade them that New York real estate wasn’t priced for kings or working some new math to convince them they could spend more than they could afford. That meant daylight hours, when an apartment or a townhouse would be showing well, the sunlight spilling in, and Leo could pretend there were no shadows at all, folks desperate to believe that, anyway. Timing his visits to avoid Leo meant a shower usually cut into Sonny’s own workday and wages, but what could you do?
Sundays were generally plenty busy for Leo, but it was too early still for clients to be house hunting. So maybe Sonny would ride instead to Coney Island, where the F train poked its nose aboveground after Church Street and he could peer down into a passing cemetery and turn philosophical if he wanted, or just catch himself some daylight from the comfort of the subway car. Maybe he’d head uptown to Columbus Circle, breathe in the perfumed women, and try to snag a left-behind newspaper so he could catch up on world events, some crisis in China or London that was moving across the world at light speed and might be just the thing that was affecting the mood today in Sonny’s underground home office at what he considered the center of the earth.
One thing for sure: even if the mood belowground seemed as sour as meat gone bad, he didn’t want to go above to walk aimless streets. It was too cold, the kind of acid wind-cold that bypassed your clothes and gnawed at your bones. The kind that brought a bitterness with it, as if it were taunting you about what might have been but wasn’t, what could have happened but didn’t. When you should have touched this or smelled that and you just let it slide on by, like you had forever.
You didn’t have forever. You wanted to believe the food would always taste good and the body keep on working fine enough and the trains always run, more or less on time. You wanted to believe there was no danger you couldn’t scuttle from, and there never would be. That you’d always have another chance to set things right, figure it out, concentrate hard, kiss someone soft on the hollow at the base of her long neck, beg her to stay. But it wasn’t true. One thing Sonny Hirt had been around long enough to learn: forever was a nasty lie, a red line across a neatly written page, a giggling kid with a needle in his arm. Forever was an opiate that blurred your vision and sidetracked you from doing what needed to be done. Forever was more deadening by far than the Bowery’s bhang.
NEW YORK: 7:12 A.M. MECCA: 3:12 P.M.
Vic arched her back, spun in a tight circle, and lifted her forehead as if to permit God to plant a kiss there. She felt the tip of her careless ponytail reach halfway down her back and was aware of the small beads of sweat that gathered in the tiny teardrop indentation above her lips. At a cue from the music, she spun around and sank to her knees, head lowered as if in prayer, then sprang up, extended again. You are not human, she told herself. You are a flower, blooming, with the power to push away the earth itself. With this vision in mind, she turned a leap into a glide. She heard Alex, watching from the third row of the theater on the Lower East Side, clap his hands. This was only rehearsal, but she made a brief, silent prayer to bring this same energy to the opening night.
Moving as sharply as she could, Vic shot forward from the waist and then reversed the motion, thrusting her pelvis to grind with another of the dancers—a redhead named Leslie, though Vic thought of her at this moment not as a woman but as pure form. She and Leslie twirled apart as a third dancer laughed on cue in a shrill way that still sounded eerie to Vic, even after all these rehearsals. The unnerving laughter was Alex’s signature. She remembered him talking about what this choreography meant to him—“It’s about how we cross boundaries for love. How we torture ourselves, we’re desperate with longing, but we’re all essentially and finally alone, forced to define personal integrity individually and, and—” Here he threw up his hands in frustration over the impossibility of translating the dance’s passion into mediocre words—“that’s the impulse. That’s all.”
Alex was a genius. She was thrilled, at age twenty-three, to be part of his company, even if he wasn’t as widely recognized yet as he should be.
“All right, kids,” Alex called from above. “Something isn’t quite right in that one spot right before the culmination. You know what I’m talking about, Glenn and Vic. You two almost collide.” He slapped his hands together and said the last word with comic drama.
Glenn,