Chapter 24
RAQ
We walked the whole boardwalk home, the long way, as she asked.
She went down mid-sentence when we got to bed, sand still in her socks, and when her breath ran long I got up, and sat in the dark of the kitchen, and held what I had done, and named it — because the terms are the terms even when the only court is me.
I told her a true sentence tonight. I built the whole field of truths around it so the lie would grow in a row with the rest, and she took it in like doctrine, and grieved for me, and put her hand over my heart.
I can never have a child. Every word true, and every word aimed.
Not cannot make — the making is one unguarded hour, that is the horror — but she heard built without, heard a wound instead of a wall, because I planted it between two true things where her kindness would do the burying for me.
She pitied me. I used her pity as the shovel.
There is a promise on the pad on her refrigerator, under the St. Anthony magnet, in the rules we shook hands over: when I hold something back, I will tell you I am holding it.
My words. My clause — the only honest architecture available to a thing like me, and I built it myself, and tonight I stood inside it and found the way around it, because I am old, and the old know where every building bends.
She would say the clause is broken. She would be right. I will carry it broken, and when the bill arrives, I will pay it without one word about the reasons.
Toward morning she rolled over and took possession of my arm, and I lay still under the small mortal weight of everything I could not lose, and I watched the ceiling grow pale, and thought about nothing but the three fixed points of my sky.
Friday morning Nina called during the eggs, on speaker, because in that house the telephone is a public utility.
"Sunday," Nina's voice said, at Nina's volume, from the counter between the salt and the coffee. "You're bringing the bread from 86th, and I need to know now if the giant eats lamb, because Anthony's doing a whole thing."
"He eats everything," Cate said, at the stove. "He's a growing boy."
"And Gina has informed the entire second seating that she is sitting next to him again, and that it is permanent, and I quote, 'because he answers the actual question you asked.'"
Cate looked at me across the kitchen, and the corner of her mouth came up.
"Tell Gina the seat's hers," she said.
"Good. Bread. Lamb. Sunday." Nina hung up mid-breath, on to the next thing.
Cate slid the eggs onto two plates and sat down across from me and pointed her fork at the phone.
"You've been drafted, you understand. That's a standing order now. Lamb, every year, forever. There's no discharge from Nina's army."
"I know," I said. "I enlisted on purpose."
She laughed with her mouth full, and hooked her foot around my ankle under the table, and left it there while she ate, and I drank the coffee and felt the weight of her foot on my ankle, and did not move for anything.
After the eggs she needed bread and a list of things for the week, so we walked to 86th Street, and I carried the cart, because the cart is mine now.
The fish man started my order when he saw us coming. In the bread line, the old woman ahead of us turned around and told Cate that her own mother, rest her soul, bought this same semolina every Friday of her life.
"Then we're doing it right," Cate said, and the woman patted her arm.
At the fruit stand she argued with Sofia about peaches out of season on principle, lost, bought the peaches.
A man I had once moved out of a doorway by the collar nodded to me from across the avenue, carefully, twice.
Two boys went by on one bicycle, yelling.
The el came over and everyone under it paused their sentences without noticing they did it, the whole street holding one breath, and finished the sentences when it passed.
She put her arm through mine on the walk back, cart wheels ticking, sun on the awnings, bread warm against my ribs where the bag rode.
"What," she said, halfway home.
"Nothing."
"You're doing the face again."
I was memorizing the street. The awnings, the nod, the el-pause, the exact weight of a woman's arm through mine on a Friday with bread. I did not tell her that.
"It's a good street," I said.
"It's the best street," she said, like a woman correcting a small error of fact, and squeezed my arm, and we walked the rest of it slow.
The books they wrote about us say we fell for what we taught and what we touched. They never wrote down the true charge. We were shown the inside of a morning like that one, and we wanted to stay in it. That is the whole crime.
After the marketing she settled in at the studio end of the apartment to write her treatment report, whole and documented, as Sal raised her.
I told her I had cargo to look at in Red Hook. It was even true. There is always cargo in Red Hook.
The fish market by day pretends very hard, and I went through the pretending to the back stairs, and up, and the smell of the counting floor came down to meet me — old paper, colder air, the particular quiet of a room where sums are what there is instead of weather.
Morax was at the standing desk.
Gray suit. Gray coat on the rack. The coffee cup stood at his elbow, full, untouched, the way it is always full and always untouched — a prop from a play about being the kind of thing that drinks coffee.
He finished the column he was on before he looked up, which was either doctrine or a message, and with Morax there is no difference.
"Watcher." He set down the pen. "Twice in one season. I'm going to start thinking you like the conversation."
"Last night your kind stood on a tower at Coney Island and let me see it."
"Not my kind." Mild. Instant. "That one belongs to no one, and you already paid once for asking about it. You came here to spend something. Spend it."
I did not sit. I took the room instead — the nine clocks, all wrong, all for different markets; the three clerks who stopped existing in the useful sense the moment I cleared the stairs; the one staircase, and me between everything and it.
"South of the beach last night," I said. "Over the water, off the point. That one was yours."
Morax looked at me for a moment. Then he came out from behind the desk, which he has never once done, and crossed to the window, and stood looking down at the market with his hands folded behind him like a man reviewing a portfolio.
"You counted," he said. "Good. I stood where you'd count me. Do you know how long it has been since anyone went to the trouble of being seen by a Watcher? It's a lost courtesy. Like handwriting."
"Say what it meant."
"It meant: look up, Baraqiel."
He said my name. He has never said my name. The room went very still around it, and one of the clerks stopped pretending to breathe.
"You stand on that block every night," Morax said. "A season of it. A season of you, the oldest sentry in the inventory, walking one door in Bensonhurst against — what? Name it. You've never once named it. Go on. What are you guarding her from?"
"From everything that watches her."
"From us." He turned around, and he was smiling.
"From the trace on the block. From the thing on the tower.
From the gray coat at the counting desk.
From the whole dark half of the world — that's the threat map, isn't it?
That's the perimeter you've been walking.
" The smile widened, and the laugh came up through it, low, incredulous.
"You think you're protecting her from us? "
The nine clocks ticked, out of step.
He came back to the desk. He squared his book.
And when he spoke again the laugh was gone, and what was under it was worse — the flat, the true-flat, the register I use, coming out of a thing I have hated for centuries.
"We want to see this happen, Watcher. Whatever this is — the door, the woman, the light in the basement.
There is not one of us on either side of this borough that will put a hand on it.
Our numbers are dwindling. We are fewer every century, and nothing replaces us.
So I will bill you nothing for the following: the ones you should count are not down here. "
"Then who stood on the tower."
"Something that wants to watch," said Morax.
"Wanting to watch is not wanting to stop.
Learn the difference. It is the whole difference there is, in my trade.
" He picked up the pen. He found his column.
"You came here to buy a threat you could fight, Baraqiel.
Fists, contracts, stairwells — a shape your hands know.
I am declining the sale. There is no product.
The only party in creation with a reason to end what is happening in that basement has never once banked in this market.
" His eyes came up over the spectacles, once.
"And you have known that since before I existed.
You have simply been happy. And happy makes brave men stupid. "
So the demons did not want to harm Cate, as far as I could tell.
But what Morax had just said sounded like something Camael would have said to me. And that was not a comfort at all.
I walked back over the bridge at human speed, and the harbor ran gray and patient under me, and I made myself say it in order, because order is what I have instead of prayer.
The demons are not the threat. The demons are the audience.
The watcher on the tower wants to watch. Wanting to watch is not wanting to stop.
Cam came at night, off the record, to warn me instead of reporting me — and there was fear in his face, and I had never once seen fear there before.
And above all of it, the only party with a reason — a standing order that needs no signature, and a promise that does not say never, only never again by water.
I had spent a season guarding her doors against the dark. But nothing in the dark wants her. Everything that watches her block watches it because I am on it. The danger was never going to come up her street some night.
The danger came up her street months ago, in the rain, and she opened the door, and fed it eggs.
The danger is me. It has been me the whole time.
She was at the stove when I came in, and her whole face lit.
That is the fact I will keep from that kitchen: I came through the door with the worst knowledge of my exile in me, and a woman at a stove turned around and lit up like a window.
She crossed the kitchen with the spoon still in her hand and kissed me hello — garlic on her hands, tomatoes and red wine on her mouth, sauce going on the stove behind her — and I held her one beat longer than hello holds.
"How was the cargo?"
"Fine."
"Liar." She said it into my collar, easy, and then she leaned back in my arms and looked at me, and the easy went out of her face by degrees. "You've got the face again. You've had it since the beach."
She stepped back. Spoon lowered. Eyes level.
"Raq. Am I in danger?"
I gave her my best smile — the old one, the unfair one, the one made for exactly this work — and I let the calm run off me toward her, slow and deep, like heat off a stone, and I took her back by the waist with both hands.
"Absolutely not," I said.
Every word true. Every word aimed. She is in no danger — the moment I am gone.
I kissed her before she could read the build, and she came up on her toes into it, and laughed against my mouth, and called me a menace, and went back to the sauce, and the kitchen went on being the kitchen — steam, garlic, her voice moving through the small news of the day — while I set the table.
Over her shoulder, on the refrigerator, the pad hung under the St. Anthony magnet where it has hung since the night we shook hands. Her handwriting. The first rule, pressed hard enough to read from across a room.
No disappearing.
On Sunday there would be lamb, and bread from 86th, and a twelve-year-old in her permanent seat, asking questions I answer straight.
By Sunday I would be gone.