Chapter 19
RAQ
She turned the prints face-down.
One at a time, in reverse working order — the field, the scars, the face, the kneel, the hem, the robe — and I let her, because some viewings have to be ended for the bereaved.
She showed me the day.
Not mine. The kneeling one is not me. But I know that ash. I know the kneel — it belongs to no ceremony; it is what is left when the legs stop being consulted. And I know the small pale lights. I watched them rise off brothers whose names I kept. I felt mine go.
Later she slept, one fist in the quilt, her breath keeping its slow human count against my chest, and I lay in the dark and went back to the room.
My day I have. The kneel, the taking, the landing — every procedural minute, mine on demand. So I reached past it, for the reason. The why of me. What I wanted so badly that they took everything for it. Who.
Nothing.
A shape where something stood. Grief with no address on it. Hands, small, in water — whose, I cannot say.
I went back again. Again nothing. I have misplaced nothing in the whole of the record — I can name every cup ever handed to me — and I lay in a basement in Bensonhurst holding a sleeping woman, reaching into my history and closing my hand on air, and until last night I had never once noticed the air was there.
Toward morning I built myself an answer.
The general one: we all wanted; I wanted what the two hundred wanted; sentenced with them, correct under the law it came from.
Maybe the taking pulls the root of the wanting out with it.
Maybe every one of us walks the exile with a room like this and no reason to open the door. That would almost be a mercy.
It did not sit.
Because the hands kept coming back. Small. In water. Not faded the way residue fades — kept, the way evidence is kept. And grief does not attach to nothing. Grief takes an object the way fire takes fuel, and mine burns with no fuel anywhere in the room.
An answer that cannot explain the burning is not an answer.
She stirred against me, and settled, and her heartbeat went on counting the dark, and I lay still and let her have the sleep.
I needed the truth.
And in all the scattered length of the exile, there is exactly one of us I would trust to hand it to me whole.
Toward dawn she rolled over, took possession of my arm, and slept on. I lay still under the weight of her and watched the ceiling go gray, and by the time the first trucks moved on Bay 50th, I had my route.
She was at the counter making the coffee when I came into the kitchen.
“I’m going to see my brother,” I said. “Today.”
She turned with both cups and put mine in my hand.
“Which one — the one who inspects you, or the one who guts fish?”
“The fish. Sar. He came down a different road than I did — his story is his, and someday, if he allows it, I’ll tell you. What matters is this: he is the only one of us I would put a question to.”
“What question?”
“Last night I told you what they took.” The truth, whole, per the terms. “What I cannot tell you — what I cannot tell myself — is why. What I wanted that was worth everything they took for it. I reach for it, Caterina, and the place has been emptied. He is the one I trust to tell me whether that is true of all of us — or only of me.”
She put her cup down. She came across the kitchen and stood in front of me, and she did not touch me, and being stood in front of by her is a thing I am still learning to hold my shape through.
“Okay,” she said. Quiet. “How dangerous is this one?”
“It isn’t,” I said. “He is the safest thing I know. In all the while I have known him, he has never once given me a reason to watch him.” I drank the terrible coffee, because it was hers, and it was mine, and I have a position on it now.
“The work stays covered today. The alarm stays on. If anything is wrong — anything, a sound, a smell, Donnie being quiet — you call, and you stand at the interior wall, and I will be here before the phone cools.”
“You’ll be at the other end of wherever.”
“Yes,” I said. “It won’t matter.”
She looked at me for a moment with all of it in her face — the night, the size of it — and then she reached up and fixed my collar, which did not need fixing, and I carried that the whole sixty blocks.
“Bring him a pastry,” she said. “Whatever he is. Nobody’s above a pastry.”
I walked, and with every block I was breaking doctrine — ours, the only doctrine the fallen ever wrote for ourselves.
One of us is a rumor. Two of us standing together is a signature, and things that read the air can read it from a very long way off.
I could count on one hand the times I had broken it, and I would not need the whole hand.
I had not stood in a room with Sar since they raised the bridge over the Narrows. And still I knew where he was the way you know where a lighthouse is. All of us always know. It is the one thing the distance is for.
Before I left her block I walked it once, both corners, the alley, the laundromat step.
The trace was there — last night’s pass, cold, correct, regular as a tide — and it had been saying the same thing for a week now: closer, and more often, and in no hurry at all.
What it is waiting for, I have not solved.
I stood over the cold print of it with her window at my back, and then I went to ask my question, because the room she had asked into last night was standing open, and I could not close it.
I took the long way, on foot, human speed, because you do not arrive at Sar’s at speed — you arrive announced, upwind, slow, as you would approach anything that has chosen its ground.
Sheepshead Bay in late March is gulls and diesel and the smell of the night’s catch going into ice, and the charter boats sat along the Emmons Avenue piers in their slips with their radar masts down, and on the deck of the third boat from the end a man in yellow rubber overalls was coiling a hose with the precision of a surgeon closing.
He did not look up. He had known I was coming since I crossed the avenue. Possibly since I crossed the borough.
“Baraqiel,” said Sar, to the hose.
“Sariel.”
“All this while, and you catch me in the waders.” He straightened — and for one breath, before anything arrived in his face, the frame under the yellow rubber was only what it is: a thing built for older work, holding a hose. Every gull on the rail left at once.
Then his face did the thing I had walked sixty blocks bracing for, the thing none of the rest of us can do anymore: it opened.
All the way. Joy, actual joy, unbanked, disgraceful, aimed at me like glare off the water.
“Come aboard. Wipe your feet. There’s coffee, and it’s good, because unlike some of us I did not stop having standards in the Bronze Age. ”
The boat was called the Carrie Ann and she was old and she was immaculate.
That is Sar entire, if you want him in a sentence: everything he touches is old and immaculate.
The deck was scrubbed to the grain. The rods stood in their holders like a rack of rifles in a chapel.
Below, in the galley, the cups hung on their hooks in a row so exact it read as liturgy, and he moved through the small space as he has always moved — nothing wasted, nothing hurried, a discipline so complete it has stopped being visible and become the man.
“You work this boat,” I said.
“I'm the mate. Long enough that nobody asks questions anymore.” He poured. The coffee was, in fact, good. “Captain thinks I’m sixty and Portuguese. I gut fish, I tie rigs, I pull tourists’ hooks out of tourists’ thumbs.
In the fall we get the blues running and the whole rail goes up at once, forty lines, everybody screaming.
” He handed me the cup and his eyes were bright as struck metal.
“It’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I ran a garrison at Nineveh. ”
“You always liked the water.”
“The water doesn’t remember anything.” He racked the last coil of hose true, edge to edge.
“I find that restful.” He leaned against the little counter, folded his arms, and took my measure — and the joy banked itself — not away, just down, a lamp shaded by hand.
“Now. You broke doctrine, you walked here upwind like a gentleman, and you’re carrying a bakery box.
So either the world is ending, or it’s a woman. ”
“Why is it one or the other?”
“Brother,” he said. “It’s always one or the other.”
“It may be both.”
“It usually is.” He nodded at the box. “What’s in the bakery box?”
“Sfogliatelle. She sent them. Her instruction was: nobody’s above a pastry.”
Sar looked at the box for a long moment, and then up, and did not say anything at first.
“She sent provisions,” he said, finally, “to your brother. Whom she has never seen. On the strength of your word that he exists.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me one thing about her. Not the file. One thing.”
I did not have to look for it.
“She fixes what no one else will fix.”
Sar untied the string, took out one pastry, and ate it with the entirety of his attention, standing, complete. He wiped his hands on a cloth that hung at an exact fold.
“Good,” he said. “The pastry, and the woman. Continue.”
I had rehearsed an approach on the walk, an order of questions, a way in. I abandoned all of it, because it was Sar, and lying to Sar is like lying to open water.
“The ask,” he said, before I found the first word. “The harbor heard it — I heard it gutting porgies, nearly took my thumb off. That was her.” It wasn’t a question, so I let it stand. He waited anyway. “And you answered it.”
“Before I knew I was moving.”