Chapter 24 Utter Fucking Helplessness
Utter Fucking Helplessness
Anca remained statue-frozen outside her apartment door, her hand pinched around the backup key she’d inserted into the lock, her head lowered. She’d been motionless for maybe ten seconds. It was like someone had hit pause. Evan stood behind her, waiting.
“Will you…?” Her voice trailed off.
He waited.
“Will you please go inside and check the closets, beneath the bed?”
He said, “Yes.”
He knew no one was inside but that wasn’t the point.
She glanced nervously over a shoulder up the hall. “I’ll come in with you and wait just inside the door.”
She stepped aside and he entered.
Her sparse apartment was scrupulously kept.
Couch and love seat protected by plastic covers, dark wood furniture without a speck, counters wiped clean.
Inexpensive furnishings and decor were proudly displayed.
Frayed kilim rug, chipped bowl atop tattered tablecloth, profoundly mediocre floral still life, sun-faded and framed in shiny black plastic, everything maintained with the temperance of someone who’d inherited the rigors of communist scarcity.
A rickety secretary desk held candles and pictures of family—dour antecedents posing stiffly, a vibrant young woman Evan took to be Anca’s mother, and a host of shots of Anca at various ages with her father, a robust man with a beard, a warm smile, and a scattering of stubble rounding out his balding pate.
Young Anca on his knee, atop his shoulders, at his side holding a fishing pole. He was a bear of a man, Anca his cub.
Resting atop a window AC unit were a postcard-size image of Jesus and a photographic portrait of a saint or priest with a soft beard and piercing blue eyes.
In the kitchenette nook, an ancient refrigerator hummed and clanked, its door clad with various magnets—a U.S.
flag, Michael Jackson, the Statue of Liberty.
There were no intruders in the cabinets or dishwasher.
Reversing course, Evan passed Anca by the front door.
She was shouldered into a coatrack, face wan, eyes wide with concern.
He flashed her an all-clear sign and then moved to safe her bedroom.
IKEA bed, battered nightstand, pastel comforter.
A decal of flowering ivy stretched along one wall and around a prison-small window, the street view impaired by a skein of telephone wires.
A floating shelf held a few tiny succulents, a stuffed-animal penguin from the Bronx Zoo, and a row of novels—Russian, twentieth-century American lit, and some obligatory Mihai Eminescu.
A normal young woman’s room. What had he expected, velvet Jesus paintings and bloody crucifixes?
His RoamZone dinged, a text from Joey: yr car out frnt, mercedes, keys on lft rear tire.
Leaning closer to the window, he peered down. Shiny and out of place at the curb, a 450 EQS+ in silver metallic.
He could live with that.
Another ping: still finding a beachhead for vensend systems. gimme til manana + ill have something on yngtl69.
Copy, he texted back. And check databases for goat skull tatt on left pec.
Next he safed the bathroom, raking back the shower curtain. All clear.
The second bedroom was impeccably preserved, the bed made up bounce-a-quarter tight, a wool blanket folded lengthwise across the foot.
On a side table rested a plastic bowl filled with painted eggs, each one strikingly unique.
A dried sponge on the windowsill acted as a reverse floral frog for Romanian and U.S.
toothpick flags, fanned up in a peacock display of patriotism.
A wall poster showed peasants in embroidered clothes linked arm in arm in a hora circle dance.
The white lettering beneath read, I LOVE AMERICA, THE COUNTRY OF MY FREE ADOPTION.
IT EMBODIES ALL THE FREEDOMS. The grateful immigrant, he thought, lifeblood of American democracy.
Evan checked the closet and under the bed and then turned to leave. Beside the door, a weathered cowboy hat hung on a hook over a well-loved jean jacket. Beneath it on the floor rested a pair of worn slippers, stretched in the shape of her father’s feet.
He took a moment with that one.
Anca was where he’d left her, waiting nervously just inside the front door. “No one here,” he said. “You’re safe.”
“They have my keys,” she said.
“My associate arranged for a locksmith to be here in the morning,” Evan said. “I figured you might want the locks changed and a security system put in.”
“I cannot afford a security system.”
“It’s been covered.”
“No,” she said. “Just the locks. I can pay for new dead bolts.”
She eased a few steps into the living room, peering around. “I wasn’t scared to be in here when I first came back. But I’m scared now. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Nothing has to make sense right now.”
“They have my keys,” she said, again.
“I can sleep in my car,” Evan said. “Where you can see me from the window. Cell phone on. Would that be helpful?”
She nodded several times. Her face was blank. She swayed on her feet.
“Can I get you something to eat or drink?”
She blinked slowly, refocusing on him. “What?”
“Something to eat or drink?”
“Tea,” she said.
He held his arm wide, cueing her to move to the kitchen. After a slight tape delay, she followed. She sat at the tiny table for two with its place setting for one, folded her hands on the cheap vinyl place mat, and stared at nothing.
He rummaged through the cabinets. Jars of pickled cauliflower, turnips, and red peppers proliferated.
Stacked ceramic plates showed dazzling earth-tone patterns or crude images of fish and trees.
He found a mug along with an infuser and box of loose tea labeled CEAI NEGRU.
He boiled water, steeped the tea for three and a half minutes.
Quarter teaspoon of honey from a jar on the counter, a sprig of mint from the refrigerator.
He set the mug down before her along with a paper towel from the roll, just one skinny strip so as not to waste.
The Second Commandment, How you do anything is how you do everything.
“Would you like me to sit with you or leave you alone?”
“Sit.”
He sat.
She cupped her hands around the mug, lifted it to her face, closed her eyes, and breathed in the steam. Though the swelling around her eye had come down, the bruise was spreading unevenly along her temple, purple yielding to yellow.
A question had been eating at him. “You walked home,” he said. “All the way from Harlem.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They took my wallet. I had no money for a cab, no subway card. No one would help.” Through the steam, her eyes held steady. “You saw what I looked like.”
She’d looked terrible. Homeless, mentally ill, drug ravaged.
Human wreckage beyond salvation, another inconvenient face like those from war zones or Third World disasters.
In her three-hour walk from Harlem to the Bronx, she’d passed thousands of people.
No one had stepped forward. Not a single person.
His jaw had tightened. He noted her noting it. Despite coming in and out of a trauma daze, she was still attuned to those around her.
“I’m not going to hand my suffering over to you,” she said. “To a force of violence who answers to no one and nothing. Because where does that lead?”
“To less brutality.”
“You use brutality to eliminate brutality?”
“I’ve found strongly worded letters to be ineffective.”
She made a noise of exasperation. “You are trying to fix, what?”
“The bigger picture.”
“There is no bigger picture. This. This is everything. Right here, now. Heaven and hell. This is all there is. You think you see clearly, Evan of the Immaculate Perception, but you’re looking too high.
” With her knuckles, she knocked the table and then her chest. “This? This is real.” She lifted the hem of her skirt, rubbed the frayed edge with her thumb.
“This is real.” Her fingertips lifted to her bruised cheek.
“This is real.” Her hands went back to the tea, mist spooling up around her face.
“The retribution you seek is not yours to have. You will not kill them. Not on my behalf. Promise me. Promise me you will not kill anyone.”
Evan felt the hardness of the chair against his back, cold air on his face. He did not answer.
“Are you the one who was brutalized?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then you are not the one who will decide. Promise me.”
He couldn’t make the words come out. Her gaze was unremitting. She was an extraordinarily patient woman.
“I won’t kill them,” Evan said. “But I will hurt them.”
“You want them to what? Suffer?”
He considered. “I wouldn’t mind it.”
“And you want to be the perpetrator of that suffering?”
“I’m willing to.”
“Willing? Or wanting?”
“I want to ensure they cannot do this again. That means they must suffer. I don’t mind that they suffer at my hands. I want them to know why. I want them to see the evil inside them for what it is and know that they are being punished for it.”
She’d received the words but he had no read on how she might respond.
“They are suffering,” she said finally. “They are being punished. And there is much more to come.”
“Why are you concerned for them?”
“I’m not concerned for them,” she said. “I’m concerned for you.”
She made no sense. No sense at all. But that was okay. He’d just told her that nothing had to make sense right now. He would honor his pledge to her. He would not kill them.
But he would make them answer.
She sipped her tea, closed her eyes, head nodding as she dozed off. Evan reached across the table and gently took the mug from her hands so it wouldn’t spill and burn her.
“Maybe you’d like to lie down?”
“Yes. Yes.” She stood. “You will be outside? Where I can see you?”
“Yes.”
She trudged behind him to the front door.
He paused at the threshold. “Until we get the locks changed, you can slide a chair beneath the doorknob.”
“I thought you’d be watching.”
“I will be. It’s not necessary. Just if it makes you feel better.”
“It would.”
He stepped outside, eased the door shut. He’d gotten a few steps down the hall when the door opened behind him.
“Evan.”
He turned.
She looked small there in the narrow slice of open doorway. “What would happen if you lived your life as if all your choices were sacred?”
He said, “What makes you think I don’t?”
Her brow furrowed; she was pondering. “Maybe we have different definitions of what constitutes sacred.”
“Of that,” Evan said, “I’m sure.”
It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time he took up his post in the Mercedes outside Anca’s apartment.
The leather-upholstered driver’s seat with its adjustable lumbar and bolsters, heater, and ten variations of massage beat his usual lookout posts and sniper hides on tree branches, attics, and heaps of rubble.
A silhouette drifted into view up at Anca’s window. She lifted a hand in a plaintive wave.
He waved back.
The bedroom light clicked off.
He reclined the seat. The wave massage vibrated his lower back.
The plush pillow fronting the headrest cradled his neck.
Through the windshield he had a perfect vantage to the entrance of Anca’s building across the street.
Settling back, he let himself drift into a state of low-alertness that nearly qualified as dozing.
Shortly after two in the morning, he came alert at a form beelining across the road at him. Anca, wrapped to the neck in a bathrobe, feet stomped into boots, her cheeks flushed with barely restrained anger. She rapped hard on the window, though he was already reaching to lower it.
“Hypocrisy,” she said. “You said you dismiss religion because of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy isn’t in religion.
It’s in being human!” She was standing on the sidewalk, shouting at him, wind whipping her bathrobe around her calves.
“Just because someone tries to follow His way doesn’t mean that they can act perfectly.
That’s like saying that having laws is hypocritical because there are criminals who break them. ”
Her hair was shoved to one side from sleep, her hands clenched, and she canted forward on her toes as if barely holding herself back from getting angrier. Her glare held tangible rage, pain, and utter fucking helplessness.
Evan said, “Amen.”
She stood a moment longer, her face pale in the night wind. A strand of hair had blown across her eyes and she trapped it with cupped fingers and fixed it behind an ear. She blinked a few times, disoriented, as if suddenly finding herself back in her body. All the heat had washed out of her.
She moved backward a few steps, then turned, scurried across the street, and disappeared once again into her building.
Evan surfaced from the hinterland between sleep and waking at Anca’s form once more moving toward his car, this time less aggressively and in the gray light of morning. She was dressed in jeans and a bulky cable sweater, a knit hat pushing a jagged fray of bangs across her forehead.
He got the window down before she had an opportunity for more vehement knocking, though she seemed in a civil mood.
She ducked down to peek at him. “Devoted,” she observed.
He gave a reassuring shrug, if shrugs could be reassuring.
“You have behaved honorably.”
He wasn’t sure what to say, and another communicative shrug would have been overkill, so he said nothing.
Anca jerked her head toward the backseat. “Who’s that?”
Evan turned.
Candy was sitting behind him, fresh faced and beaming, one elbow slung across the armrest, the other hooked on the windowsill.
She smiled that wide smile. “His better half,” she said.