10
“What’re they doing?” Patrick asks. It’s a Sunday morning, and Hector’s sitting on the floor at the back of the shop, surrounded by the remnants of some old contraption the twins found in the basement. Iris is lying on her stomach, her chin in her hands, giving unsolicited advice.
“Whenever I ask what they’re building, they get shifty,” Nathaniel says.
“Is it for science class?” Patrick asks them.
“No,” Iris says without elaboration.
“Very shifty,” Nathaniel mutters.
“Nothing they do,” Patrick says low, leaning close to Nathaniel’s ear, “could be half as bad as what Susan, Michael, and I got up to, and we turned out—”
Patrick breaks off and Nathaniel winces. They really didn’t turn out fine, did they. One dead, one still crying every day, and Patrick—Patrick is lonely for reasons that Nathaniel can’t make sense of.
“What does ‘turned out all right’ even mean?” Nathaniel asks.
“You had a family tragedy. It isn’t a moral failing.
” He pushes an irritating strand of hair behind his ear—god, he needs a haircut—and when his arm drops, his knuckles brush against the back of Patrick’s hand.
It wasn’t on purpose, but he keeps his hand there for a moment before sticking it in his pocket.
On the radio, Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” is playing.
“Nobody took your stupid wire,” Iris says.
“It isn’t a wire. I keep telling you, there aren’t wires. It’s a clamp.”
“Nobody took your clamp either.”
“I know! I didn’t say they did.”
“Well, find it, then.”
Hector sighs, put upon, and hauls himself to his feet. He glances around the room, then crouches down and pulls something from behind the radiator. Hector has eyesight like a cat. “There it is. Somebody must have kicked it there. Oh—but this isn’t what I need after all.”
“There used to be radio supply stores,” Patrick says. Both the twins jump, like they hadn’t noticed him and Nathaniel standing there. “Downtown.”
“That’s what our dad said,” Hector says. “Radio Row. They’ve all been knocked down to build that bank.”
“It isn’t a bank,” Iris says. “It’s the World Trade Center.”
“Sounds like a bank to me.”
“Also, we don’t need radio supplies, because we aren’t making a radio.”
It doesn’t look like a radio, that’s for sure. It’s made of dirty black metal, and the bulk of it is shaped like a barrel with a crank. Nathaniel’s certain he’s seen something like it, but he can’t imagine when or where.
“Do you have a better idea?” Hector asks.
“Where did all those stores go, though?” Patrick asks.
Nathaniel gets the Yellow Pages and finds a radio supply store on Fourteenth Street, but when they call, nobody answers.
There’s another store on Laight Street, which nobody in the room has ever heard of.
When they consult the road map that Patrick keeps by the cash register, it turns out to be near the Holland Tunnel.
There’s another store near the South Street Seaport.
“I’ll be down there tomorrow,” Patrick tells the twins. There’s a huge old used bookstore near City Hall that Patrick periodically combs for anything he can resell at a profit. “I’ll swing by Laight Street. If it’s nice out, I could walk across town to the other store, too.”
The twins look genuinely surprised, like Patrick’s an ogre who’s never done a single nice thing for them, rather than the man who’s been buying them pizza and sharpening their pencils and proofreading their essays for the past two years.
“I’ll come with you tomorrow,” Nathaniel says when they’re getting ready for bed. Whenever he steps outside, he feels like he’s being plunged directly into the abyss, but each time it gets slightly easier. Or maybe he’s just getting used to the contents of the abyss.
In the morning, they leave Susan in charge of the shop. After a cold and rainy April, May finally feels like spring, and they both wind up carrying their jackets.
“How far is it?” Nathaniel asks.
“Two subway stops.”
Nathaniel has been on the subway, of course, when he visited New York years ago. But that was back when he was compos mentis. They’re still on Jones Street and his hands are already sweaty. He resists the urge to hide in a doorway.
“Or we could walk,” Patrick says. “It’s only twenty minutes.”
They walk down Hudson Street. It’s not a particularly scenic part of the city, mostly filled with warehouses and former factories, with a few gritty-looking garages scattered around.
Painted on the sides of brick buildings, faded advertisements promote stores that probably went out of business a decade ago.
Every block seems to have a diner or lunch counter, and only half are still open.
“I wonder what this neighborhood is called,” Patrick says when they cross Spring Street. “It’s too far west to be SoHo. I’m not sure I’ve ever been over here.”
“Really? Well, I’m glad I get to see it with you,” Nathaniel says, dreadfully earnest. Good god. Patrick doesn’t say anything, but he bumps their shoulders together.
Dooryard Books is in a part of the city that’s busy and prosperous. It’s filled with restaurants and little shops. But Nathaniel knows—from alarming personal experience—that a few blocks to the west, things get seedy.
This part of the city is seedy in a different way. It feels half abandoned, faintly apocalyptic. This is a place where things used to be.
“Artists will move in here, like they did in SoHo,” Patrick says, like he’s reading Nathaniel’s mind.
“If they haven’t already started. Jerome lives in a loft with some artists on Chrystie Street and they have to take the subway just to get groceries.
You can’t buy so much as a loaf of bread anywhere nearby. ”
Nathaniel imagines these abandoned factories and warehouses filling up with drag queens and artists and is surprised to realize that the idea pleases him.
He likes things neat and tidy, new and fresh and clean.
His house in Virginia—he presses his arm briefly against Patrick’s, keeping the abyss from getting too close—was always orderly.
His desk at the agency was so pristine that it was a standing joke that he must never do any work.
He spent his childhood obeying the logic of sheet music before realizing numbers could be made to follow the same rules.
Order and symmetry and rules have always made him feel peaceful; they were his allies, trustworthy and reliable.
The fact that he can walk down this street—an old warehouse with broken windows on one side of the street, a boarded up bar on the other, a car with missing hubcaps slumped against the curb —and feel like he belongs here can only be a sign that something is wrong with him.
But there is something wrong with him; he already knew that.
Some fundamental part of himself got left behind in Langley, or in the cold winter streets, or maybe he lost it years ago at a graveside.
Maybe that loss isn’t gaping emptiness, but space; maybe there’s room in him for something else.
Maybe there’s room for him to be something else.
The store, when they reach it, looks like someone took the contents of another, larger electronics store, tipped it on its side, and dumped it into this place.
“Bet you feel right at home,” Nathaniel murmurs, and watches the corner of Patrick’s mouth tick up.
Patrick starts combing through the store for the parts Hector wants, but Nathaniel goes up to the shopkeeper and hands him the sketch Hector made.
The shopkeeper frowns, tilts his head, frowns some more, then disappears.
He comes back ten minutes later with half a dozen mysterious objects.
Nathaniel could not, if his life depended on it, identify a single one of them. He takes out his wallet.
“I’ve got it,” Patrick says, reaching for his own wallet.
“No you don’t.” Nathaniel puts his hand on Patrick’s wrist. Giddy sparks shoot up his arm. “You’re always buying everything. Meals, drinks, snacks.”
“That’s our deal. You’re paying for room and board. We shook on it.”
“You get pizza for the kids, you picked up new violin strings for me when you were out last week, and I think you’ve been buying Susan’s groceries since February. Let me get something for once. You’re overpaying me—”
“I am not,” Patrick says. He’s a terrible liar.
“—and charging me next to nothing for rent. I can afford a couple antennas.”
“Is that what they are,” Patrick says, marveling at the weird coils of metal.
“Frankly, I have no idea.”
“Three dollars and forty-eight cents,” the shopkeeper says. Nathaniel lets go of Patrick’s wrist and produces a five-dollar bill. Patrick puts his wallet away.
The shopkeeper wraps everything up in newsprint and puts it in a paper bag that Nathaniel insists on carrying.
“Susan chips in for groceries,” Patrick says when they’re on the sidewalk. “Neither of us are keeping track right now of who owes who, but I don’t have less money than I did when she moved in. And I haven’t been paying her when she covers the cash register at the store. Maybe I should.”
“She’d laugh in your face,” Nathaniel says.
From the electronics store, the bookstore should only have been a ten-minute walk, but they get completely turned around.
“Stop complaining,” Nathaniel says after Patrick’s spent five minutes bitching about all the construction making it impossible to know where anything is. “It’s a nice day. We’re getting fresh air.”
“Sure, except for the car exhaust. We’ll both get miners’ lung.”
Nathaniel tugs Patrick’s sleeve. “Come on.”
When they reach the bookstore, Patrick finds what he declares are a decent Lowell and an excellent Dickinson, while Nathaniel amasses a stack of paperback Gothic romances.
“If I want serious literature, I can find it in the store I basically live inside,” Nathaniel explains after Patrick’s laughed at him. “But if I want Gothic mansions and the dastardly cads who own them, I have to look elsewhere.”