Chapter 24
“Is there still dinner?” Rai gasped as she stumbled into the Place. She didn’t recognize the receptionist, a tall Asian guy. Evening staff seemed completely irregular.
“You just get run over by the A train?” His face mixed concern with humor, suggesting to Rai that she looked as frantic as she felt. “I think there’s still time.” He picked up the phone and dialed three numbers. “Enough food for one more hungry soul? Thanks.” He turned back to Rai. “Hurry up. Pity the shower’s closed for the night. Looks like you need one.”
Though Rai might normally have been offended by this indulgence, she brushed it off.
After as much pasta as she could stuff down, two containers of yogurt, some fruit, and a rather harried conversation about chess openings with Toker, she almost felt ready to go to the park alone. Even so, she sat alone for a while, trying to understand why the cops had gotten so worked up.
Someone sat down next to her. “How ya doin’?” It was Dashel, the big guy with the kind voice who handled crises.
“Tired. But fine.”
“Yazmín told me you’d been in some trouble. Gotta be scary to be on the street without Z around. What’s up? Crips after you or some shit?”
“Something like that.” That explanation sounded much better than the truth.
“They’re hard asses. Gotta be brave to stand up to them.”
“Little girl doesn’t mean little courage.”
“You go, girl. Even so, if ya ever need somebody t’walk ya to the subway, just ask me.” A quick look at his muscles assured Rai that no one would mess with him. “But I just wanted to know if you need anything. Looks like you’ve been having a tough time.”
“Not so bad.”
“’Cause we can help you find a place to stay, or somebody to talk to–”
“Thanks. But unless you’ve got a new interpretation of Bulgakov, I’m not really interested.” Rai used this line whenever anyone offered help, especially psychiatric help. She had found that, when uttered with the right mix of irony and superiority, it drove away anyone who wanted to do something for her.
“Just an idea. You know where we are.” As Dashel got up, he slid a couple of Power Bars in front of Rai. “Just in case you miss dinner next time.” With a kind smile, he walked out of the lunch room. Rai remembered Z’s repeated comment that The Place would be much more tolerable if the staff were just mean enough to allow you to resent them. She sat for a while longer, chewing at the core of an apple, but finally Kwame asked her to leave. He was closing up. She walked slowly down the stairs to find Dashel chatting with the new guy at the front desk.
“Yo Rai. Whassup.”
“Whassup whassup,” Rai replied in her best street accent. Tomorrow, she would change her clothes, but she couldn’t do it tonight. Maybe the cops wouldn’t recognize her if she weren’t alone, though. Or if she had Dashel’s body to hide behind. “Yo, so you mind walkin’ me through the bat cave? I don’t wanna be paranoid or some shit, but the Crips hang out there.”
“Yeah. I was just tellin’ Gene about it.”
“Some big cojones you got there.” The Spanish word sounded strange on Gene’s lips.
“Ovaries. Cojones are on the outside so you can smash ‘em.”
Gene and Dashel laughed in the way Rai had hoped they would. “C’mon,” Dashel said. “Let’s get you to the subway.”
As they stepped out the door, Rai asked, “So why you here this late? Doesn’t seem fair.”
“Racking up comp time.” He grinned boyishly, then turned to greet the security guard at the hotel next door. Even if Rai had wanted to continue the conversation, it would not have been possible. Everyone on the street — the kids, the security guards, the workers in the restaurants — greeted him with waves and smiles. Even the Crips in the bat cave shook his hand as he passed by. Dashel was a big, strong guy, Rai thought, but that wasn’t how he kept the peace. His laughs and his handshakes and his friendly “whassup whassup” calmed everyone. So different from the cops.
At the turnstile, Dashel pulled out his Metrocard. “I doubt you got the money for a token, and I don’t wanna see you jumpin’ the train. This is unlimited, so no skin off my back.” He slid the card through the reader and pushed Rai through the gate. “See ya.” He whistled as he jogged back up the stairs.
Rai wondered how long it had been since she had been on the subway legally. Never, she thought.
Rai felt immensely grateful for a calm, quiet night. She had cruised out to Prospect Park, where she felt sure that no Crip or cop would find her, and she slept hard. Not her usual, guarded doze, ready to wake and knife an attacker at any second, but involuntary, real, deep sleep.
Bored by her usual haunts, the next morning she decided to stake out new ground for her morning reading. Almost unconscious of the trains she took out of Brooklyn, she found herself at the corner of Fifth and 59th, across from the Plaza Hotel, by the de Kooning sculpture that she and Z had debated over so many times. She sat down on another sculpture — at least she assumed it was a sculpture, though it just looked like a collection of tumbled rocks — pulled Anna from her bag, and began to read.
Up until this point in the novel, Rai had tried to read slowly, paying close attention to every description and every conversation in order to figure out how Anna had wrenched herself free from the oppression of Russian formal society, but now she could no longer constrain her eyes. The story had become too exciting: high society was corrupting Levin, who had gone to see Anna and almost fallen in love with her; Anna and Vronsky had moved to the country, built a hospital, and now Anna was writing a book; the evil Countess Lydia Ivanovna had convinced Karenin to deny Anna a divorce… Her eyes devoured the words and her fingers flicked the pages more and more quickly. She failed to notice anything around her, not the tourists, not the drizzle that fell from the claustrophobic sky, not even the two policemen who stood and watched her for several minutes. Rai noticed none of this; she roamed free through the countryside near Moscow.
At perhaps three in the afternoon, Anna could no longer control her jealousy. She pursued Vronsky to his mother’s house, obsessed by an imagined rival. She scorned every face she saw on the train.
“When the train stopped at the station, Anna got out with a crowd of other passengers and, keeping away from ther as if they were lepers, stopped on the platform, trying to remember why she had come there and what she had intended to do. Everything that had seemed possible before, she found so difficult to grasp now, especially in this noisy cowd of hidous people who would not leave her in peace. Porters rushed up offering their services. Young men, stamping their feet on the planks of the platform and talking in loud voices, looked her up and down, and the people who came toward her always tried to get out of the way on the wrong side. Recollecting that she had meant to go on if there was no reply, she stopped a porter and asked if there was not a coachman with a note from Count Vronsky.”
She paced up and down the platform, carrying her little red bag, tortured by thoughts of betrayal. Then, finally, with no options left, she threw herself under the wheels of the oncoming train.
As her blood splattered the tracks, Rai closed the book, stretched, and sighed. Her eyes were moist. For the first time, she felt the damp of the drizzle and the emptiness in her stomach. She took one of the Power Bars Dashel had given her and devoured it. The book still promised a hundred more pages, but Rai knew it was over; she felt the odd fullness in her gut that heralded the end of a story, the completion of something important. She savored the sensation for a moment, then grew bored of it and wondered if Mike was at the softball fields yet. She stood and stretched again.
After a quick walk through the south end of the park, Rai slipped out of the woods onto the open grass of the softball fields. As she had hoped, Mike sat in his accustomed spot. She ran through two softball games and dashed up the bleachers. “Yo Misha, how’s it hangin’?”
Mike his his confusion well. “I have been waiting with bated breath. How was your date with young Vronsky?”
Rai laughed almost dutifully, but then became serious. “Still haven’t found him. Anna just offed herself, though, so I’m kinda thinking you might be right, and I shouldn’t look so hard for him.”
“A wise choice, I believe.”
“But the book’s so fucking right on, Mike. That’s the thing. Tolstoy thinks he’s telling some story about Russia, but you know what it’s really about? Me! My little fucking life. He’s put words to everything I feel… no, it’s like even better, ‘cause they’re not just words like ‘anomie’ and ‘angst’ and all that fucking pretense I only pretend I understand. The story tells who I am so much better than my story does.”
“Perhaps you exaggerate, Helen.”
“OK, a little. But the metaphor’s right on, the whole way through. Everything but Vronsky. Who’s Vronsky? That’s the thing. Who’s Vronsky?”
“What about that Sudanese boy you mentioned?” Mike’s eyes twinkled, as if to subvert her intensity.
“C’mon! He’s cute and all, and maybe I’d even like him. Or maybe other guys, too. But ‘like’? Come on! We’re talking me here. I can’t get by with some little affaire du coeur. I need epic. A freight train running me down — nah, that’s a cliché. A plane that crashes into me… I mean, I guess this sounds kinda stupid, but I gotta make this metaphor work, ‘cause otherwise it seems like I’m just obsessing over this book for no good reason.”
“It is a good book.”
“But it’s gotta relate to my life. I’ve been thinking about other stuff with Anna, y’know, like when she decides to write a book, and I’ve always wanted to do that, but that’s no big deal. Or maybe the way she’s so charming, but at the same time she’s excluded from society, so she’s a bit dangerous and romantic, right?”
“Have you developed a coterie of alienated aristocrats?”
“Hardly. I’ve barely even got any friends.” Mike wanted to interrupt her, but she barreled on. “And then there’s the whole freedom thing, but that’s just too obvious, isn’t it? Plus, I’m looking for real freedom, while she’s just exchanging one prison for another.”
“You try very hard to escape prisons.”
“Dude.” She smiled to break her funk. “So I dunno. Maybe I should think about the other characters and see if I can figure it out that way.”
“Helen, this is a book written almost a century and a half ago. It is not a metaphor for your life. And perhaps it is not good–”
“But if I’m gonna learn from it and from this fucking life I’m suffering though, I gotta put ‘em together. That’s just how my mind works, so that’s what I gotta do.” She looked at him with eyes that brooked no dissent. “Anyway, so it’s pretty clear that you’re Oblonsky: always cheery, a bit ironic, fun to be around. What’s he say? Something like the whole point of civilization is to make everything enjoyable. That’s you. You’ve learned to laugh at the worst shit.”
“I know you believe this a compliment, Helen–”
“But Oblonsky doesn’t come off great in the end, I know. He can be a bit of an ass and he keeps cheating on his wife and he’s way too interested in his own ambition… But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s got a pretty decent philosophy of life. So you’re like a good Oblonsky. I don’t see any of his bad qualities in you, but you’re still funny and I like to be around you.”
“Thank you, but–”
“And, I mean, not that I think of you as my brother or anything, but if we’re making a metaphor here, it’s pretty clear I’m Anna. She’s so awesome.”
“Yet, Helen, in the end–” Mike’s eyes had become serious, and Rai resolved not to let him get away with it.
“Yeah, yeah, she throws herself under the train. But here’s the thing: it’s like you’re a good Oblonsky and I’m a good Anna. I want to feel freedom like she did, and I want to live and piss off society and maybe have an epic romance — except for the kids, I definitely don’t want that, ‘cause the whole labor thing just sounds like a pain in the ass and they’d prob’ly just run away from me, anyway — but suicide? Hardly. I got too much to figure out. Look… remember how I was so into Pechorin? He’s just about storytelling and imitating people in novels and shit. Like your Madame Bovary, right? But I was reading through Anna and I figured out exactly the problem I had with Pechorin, even thought I didn’t know it at the time.” She paged through the Anna and found a page turned down. “Yeah, here it is: ‘But she found no pleasure in reading, that is to say, in following the reflection of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself.’ Cool, huh?”
“It does not appear that you have lost the pleasure of reading.”
“What, you expect the metaphor to be perfect? Of course I still get off on books. But that was the problem with Pechorin as a role model. He doesn’t let you live. He’s just so stuck on the story — in the book, right? — that he never really finds what’s happening in life. Like, there’s never any real relationship with Princess Mary; he never puts himself on the line and lives. Anna? She’s in danger the whole time. She knows her heart might break, she knows the risks she’s running, but she does it anyway.”
“But Anna did not know Vronsky, either, I believe. No more than Pechorin knew Mary–”
“Maybe not, but she actually follows her heart, y’know? For Pechorin, once he gets together the balls to do anything, it’s way too late, but Anna — she does it. She’s free.”
Mike shook his head, then sighed. “I am not so sure I find myself as Oblonsky flattering.”
“What, ya wanna be Betsy? I remember one thing she said that was just like perfect for you.” She searched through the book again. “Yeah, here it is. I even wrote ‘Mike’ in the margin.” Rai felt the tension of the last 24 hours float from her body. It felt so nice to talk to someone, to forget Z, hunger, the cops.
“You wrote in the margin? And how will you sell it?”
“It’s a paperback. Low resale value anyway. Right, so, ‘You see, one can look at a thing tragically and turn it into a torment or one can look at it simply or even gaily. Perhaps you are inclined to take things too tragically?’ That’s like you. Like that story about the Gulag you told.”
“I must tell you, Helen, that I was never–”
“I know that. You’re a shitty liar, Mike. But it was a good story, huh? I mean, great for the whole life on the street thing. Sometimes this whole gig is awful, but it’s fucking loony, too, so it’s better if you can laugh about it. So I like what you said. Anna shoulda listened to Betsy or her brother.”
“She listened to Betsy too much.”
“Yeah. Just on the wrong stuff, huh?” She paused for a moment to set down the book. “Kinda sucks for you that Tolstoy puts your philosophy in the mouth of the bad guys, huh? That can’t make you feel good.”
“Oblonsky is not exactly a villain.” Rai noted with a smile that Mike had become a little defensive.
“And then he puts his own philosophy in Levin’s mouth, even though Levin’s such a bore.” She thought for a moment. “So who’s Levin?” She scrunched her mouth in thought. “Nah, that’s the wrong way to think about it. How ’bout this: Z. Who’s Z in this whole thing?”
“Your friend. A felon. I do not know what you mean.”
“In the whole Anna analogy. I mean, if I’m gonna make the metaphor work, he’s gotta play a role, right? Like, right at the beginning I kinda thought he was Karenin. Y’know, I was gonna leave him for some dashing cavalry guard–”
“You never believed that.”
“ ‘Course not. But it was a pretty good story. Thing is, Z’s no Karenin. Short, fat, boring bureaucrat? Hardly. There’s nobody in Anna who’s like Z. Except maybe Vronsky, and he sure can’t be Z.”
“Why not?”
“ ‘Cause I was never in love with Z. Never even close.” She stared out over the fields. “I dunno. I gotta think about it, I guess.”
Mike allowed her to think for a while, but when it became obvious that no answer was coming, he changed the subject with his usual abruptness. “But I have been rude. I so wanted to speak of novels that I have ignored the more simple courtesies.” He bowed his head, then spoke as one might at the beginning of a conversation. “Tell me more of your life.”
The honest happiness she found in the ebb and flow of the conversation had almost erased thoughts of the previous twenty-four hours, but with his question, memories flooded back into her consciousness. Her face fell.
“I am sorry. It has been a difficult time?” he asked.
“Fuck yeah. Cops after me again. The effort they put into persecuting an honest graffiti philosopher.” With the last sentence, she managed to force a little levity into her voice.
“But you say you scare the police. More than simple graffiti.” Rai could never understand exactly what Mike thought of her more outrageous theories, whether interpretations of novels or explanations of police behavior. He seemed to see them as part of a game; sometimes he scolded her for breaking the rules and suggesting a totally ridiculous idea, but most of the time he seemed content to play with them.
“Maybe. I mean, it’s clear they’re after something. I still dunno what. You’re right: Z’s not clued into what freedom’s about. He’s just gettin’ off on his own fancy words. I dunno what the cops are up to.”
“Perhaps they do not like graffiti.”
“There’s lotsa graffiti around. I bet they don’t like philosophy. Or the idea of a street kid who knows more than they do.”
“Perhaps.” His eyes twinkled.
“But I think they know something. They’re trying to stop us from saying it.”
“And what is ‘it’?”
“That’s the problem. Like I said, I dunno. But these words mean something. Not necessarily what Z wants to say or even what I mean. It’s like… like I’m a pen who’s writing the meaning of life, ‘cept I don’t know what I’m writing. I gotta wait till it’s all done, then I get to read what I wrote.” She liked the metaphor; it felt clever on her tongue.
“You do not look like a pen.”
“It’s a simile, Mike. C’mon. I think it’s a pretty cool image.”
“You, who are so careful with your metaphor of Anna–”
“Hey, yeah! It’s like that, too. Anna’s writing a message, right? Her character, I mean, is part of the theme of the book. She doesn’t know what the theme is: only Tolstoy and the reader do. She’s just a part of this big–”
“You will remember that Tolstoy sacrifices Anna to convey his meaning. We would not want that.”
“Yeah…”
“You also compare yourself to a pen. A pen does not think, yet this is your great pride, yes? Thinking? You choose two metaphors that put you at the mercy of another hand.”
“Yeah, OK, but–”
“And whose hand writes with this pen? Who would be your Tolstoy? I do not think you believe in a God who works this way. And you are not–”
“OK, OK!” Rai had to laugh. “You win! The metaphor sucks. I gotta look for something better. Or maybe I gotta think about Anna some more. Figure out who Vronsky is.”
“Ah, Helenushka…” Mike looked at his watch. “I am sorry, but I must go early today.”
“Whassup?”
He blushed. She had never seen this reaction from him. “I am having dinner.”
“Dinner?” Then she realized the meaning of the blush. “With a skirt? Yo, Mike, congrats! You’re gonna hafta give me all the details tomorrow. You’re gonna score. I got a feeling.”
“Helen, I am sixty-two years old. I do not ‘score,’ I fear.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. Go buy some Viagra or something.”
“This is not what I meant.”
“Yeah, well, have a good time. You got enough condoms?”
Mike blushed. “I will see you tomorrow?”
“Unless you’re sleepin’ it off.” She winked, then laughed as he sprung down the bleachers with steps too spry for an old man. As he walked away, she watched the game for a while, thinking perhaps that it had a meaning that would clarify her life, but she saw nothing of interest at all, so she pulled her book from her pack and began to read the last, Anna-less hundred pages. They were a struggle to read; with her heroine dead, the words felt heavy and pointless. She wished she could just talk with Mike some more.
