Trouble Read online

  He shut his eyes, and his mind filled with still lifes: the man, the woman, the moon. He wanted to sit up but could not; his head dove sideways; his

  balance

  was off.

  Why’s my balance off.

  Interestingly, he had no trouble recalling the hydromechanics of the vestibular system. Spatial equilibrium is produced by synchronous processing of signals from the retinae and from the movement of endolymph fluid through the semicircular canals and ampullae. Reorientation of the head causes agitation of the cilia—

  Sometime later he awoke to the sibilance of torn cloth. A large male nurse was cutting his shirt off with a pair of blunt scissors. Faces—some of which he recognized, although none of the names were there—whizzed through his peripheral vision: getting his shoes off, poking him, measuring him, strapping him, shouting, recording numbers. He had never witnessed a primary trauma survey from the bottom up, and his head began to fill with mnemonics.

  ABCDE! AirwayBreathingCirculationDisabilityExpo—

  “Goddammit stop. Stop.” He sat up, batting away the hands that were now in the process of cutting off his pants. “Stop it, I’m fine.”

  “He’s awake.”

  “Yes I’m awake. I’m awake. I’m fine.”

  “You hit your head.”

  “I’m—will you stop cutting my pants.” He knew what they were going to do, and so he wanted to get out of the trauma bay by any means necessary. Those fucking EMTs had brought him back to St. Aggie’s. It was like Groundhog Day. Once they established that he was stable, they’d bring in the on-call surgical team, including BENDERKING DEVON PGY-2; they’d strip his clothes off for the secondary survey; everyone he had to work with tomorrow (he still believed he was coming in for work) would see him naked, a common enough nightmare that was actually happening to him.

  After a lengthy argument, he convinced them to let him remove his own pants. By that point he was walking, steady, alert, oriented. He kept saying I’m fine, but they put him through the whole humiliating process: ears, nose, mouth, rectum. They wanted to send him for a CT.

  I’m fine.

  You hit your head.

  He knew they were right. They had to check for a bleed. Part of him suspected, however, that they were prolonging their examination for kicks. Having established him as mostly okay, they had begun to make wisecracks. Paging Doctor Asscheeks.

  They wheeled him down to Imaging. He closed his eyes, shivering as they laid him on the table. The radiology labs were kept arctic cold at all times, and the gown he was in felt terribly flimsy. He made a note to be sensitive to patients who requested additional blankets.

  The tech said, “Hey kid, I hear you got a nice, hairless tush.”

  They discharged him an hour and a half later. He went back up to the trauma bay to see what had become of his shirt (gone, of course). As he gave up and decided to go home, he was accosted by a baby-faced woman in a neat pin-striped pantsuit.

  “Hello there pardner,” she said. “Some night.”

  He accepted her card. Meredith Scott Vaccaro, Assistant District Attorney, a borough seal depicting an eagle hovering over Pilgrim and Indian.

  “Call me Scottie.”

  He looked at her.

  “If you’re feeling up to it,” she said, “we can talk right now? We can do it here? What you say we go get you a cup of coffee. You got a cafeteria here, don’t you? Take care of this quick as possible?”

  He looked at her card again. The Law wanted a word with him. How’d she get here so fast? Had he done something wrong? He tried hard to remember what had happened, but the reel ran with blank frames, dark and blurry. He had been scared. He didn’t know what he’d done, but it was the right thing, had to be. The woman…a girl, really; she had been so small. He asked if she was okay.

  “Hurt. She’ll survive.” Vaccaro paused. “The gentleman, though, he I’m afraid didn’t fare so hot.”

  Jonah said nothing. He worried the edge of her card with his fingernail.

  Vaccaro said, “So, y’know, I’d like to get your side of the story, straighten it out ASAP. We don’t need your life to be any more complicated than necessary.”

  “THIS IS A FORM that allows me to ask you questions. I can’t talk to you without it, so if you want to give me your version of the events, you should sign it. No worries, it’s very standard. Bear in mind you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to? Go ahead, read it, it’s all in there. You want some coffee. Take a minute, when you’re ready you initial and sign? Be right back.”

  He watched her walk down the empty caf and turn into the vending machine nook. The six questions in front of him were familiar from television and movies. His right to remain silent, to consult an attorney. By initialing after each, he acknowledged understanding. Or…forfeiture. He tried to analyze the text but kept losing his place on the page, distracted by a dim voice: his father’s. Usually low and generous, it now rose steeply. Jonah. Don’t sign it. Call me first. Jonah. DO NOT SIGN IT.

  He stopped reading and relaxed his eyes, listening to the tray conveyor belt whirr.

  You had to admire lawyers for producing a document so simple, yet with the power to so thoroughgoingly screw you. Obliterate your civil rights with the stroke of a pen. He hadn’t been arrested—had he?—so he had no obligation to cooperate.

  But he also had no reason not to cooperate. He couldn’t possibly hurt himself by telling his version of the events. He had nothing to hide, and he wanted to go home.

  He initialed and signed.

  Immediately Vaccaro strode up with two paper cups, as though she’d been watching around the corner via closed-circuit, waiting for the pen to drop.

  “Great,” she said. “Let’s first you tell me in your own words what happened.”

  He talked. Vaccaro took notes. One part of his brain, the part that provided commentary on itself, told him that he was babbling. He tried to stop up the flow of words, but they came tumbling out. He mixed up the order of events. Backtracked. Made it seem, he felt sickeningly sure, as though he had something to hide. A custodian arrived with a mop; two hairnetted women took their places near the cash registers. Through a picture window on the westernmost wall he could make out the Hudson, smothered in fog; premonitions of daylight on the water; the stark Jersey shore.

  He mentioned that he didn’t know who had called the police.

  “You did,” said Vaccaro.

  “I did?”

  “Yup.”

  Then she began to ask questions. They seemed innocent, but he had difficulty enough establishing a chronology without having to explain why he’d been out walking at that hour, what time he’d left work, whether or not he was acquainted with the woman.

  “No.”

  “Or her attacker?”

  “No.”

  “They’re strangers to you.”

  He nodded.

  “What you did was pretty dangerous, y’know.”

  “I guess.” For the first time he considered this. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Then what made you decide to get involved?”

  He thought about the woman. Her torn stockings; her jacket engulfing her. In his memory she seemed so small. His heart had grown to scoop her up.

  What made him decide to get involved.

  Vaccaro leaned across and offered him a tissue.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  She nosed at his cup. Without noticing, he had spilled coffee all over the table. Mumbling apologies, he wiped it up, then stuffed his trembling hands in his lap.

  She asked more questions. Forty minutes passed.

  He said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “All right,” she said, chewing her pen. “Let’s get you home.”

  He stood. His pants, too, were coffee-stained. “I’m not in trouble, am I?”

  “I’ll be in touch if I need to,” she said.

  He said, “Okay,” thinking: she didn’t say no.

  • 3 •


  A COP DROVE him home. On the way Jonah left a voicemail for his chief resident, fudging and summarizing. He called it an accident. He apologized, promised to make up the day, and balled up on the rear seat of the cruiser, his chin against his knee, shivering.

  More images came back. The scream, the woman, her hair tossed over the side of her face. He remembered locking arms, tripping; a pile of garbage bags. He remembered a raised hand. A blade like a beak. Pushing it back. And then the warm night, warmer.

  He remembered, too, the man falling away from him, folding up in the gutter, a resigned susurration, like a bottle being emptied.

  “Buddy.” The cop eyed him in the rearview.

  Jonah emitted something like a burp.

  “You need to throw up?”

  “…no.”

  “You look like shit.”

  “I need to throw up.”

  They pulled over on 23rd Street. His heaves drew stares from the bag-eyed Pakistanis thronging behind a flatbed truck to offload a food cart. BAGEL BUTTER EGG MUFFIN COFFEE TEA. Although he hadn’t eaten in fourteen hours, the thought of food brought another wave of nausea. His neck was wet. He retched, spat. What had been murky and indistinct turned lurid, three-dimensional. The man grew to an impossible height; his knife lengthened into a machete. The opening of his veins brought a tidal wave, and the woman screamed loud enough to shatter stone. Worst of all, he could see where the blade had gone in: right on the carotid. Like a slaughtered steer.

  He asked the policeman to drop him at Washington Square Park, got out, and took a circuitous route home, walking until his head started to clear.

  The East Village slept late. Puma-clad joggers, dog-walkers in faux-fur miniskirts, streetcorner prophets praying to the newly risen sun. Stout Hispanic men—half-hidden in shadow; the anonymous cogs of the metropolis—lugged trash bags and fruit crates. Along St. Mark’s, graffitied shutters sealed off cafés, sushi bars, bar bars, gelato slingers, tchotchke vendors with overflowing dump bins of tube socks. Used clothing that cost more than new clothing; fetishized poverty. A smorgasbord of T-shirts bearing political slogans du moment; the many faces of Che; metaclevernesses like TAKE ME DRUNK I’M HOME. Jonah’s favorite was a swastika with a . He often wondered who besides NYU freshmen was green enough to accept that as a nuanced position.

  Near Tompkins Square Park, a skateboarder repeatedly attempted to jump a fire hydrant, each time coming a little closer to success and to wrecking the door of a parked Cadillac. A friend with a video camera encouraged him by displaying a crescent of thumb and forefinger: inches. Dew and hosewater ran scummy across the sidewalk, frothing whatever solutes lurked in the concrete. Jonah smelled the oncoming day: summer in New York. Excrement, saline, coffee grounds, fried food. The array of sensations did him good, thinned the muck in his head. Sunlight carved faces: a dejected kid dribbling a basketball; a tattooed girl using her boyfriend’s cigarette to light hers; a derelict with a shit-eating grin sharing a bench with an old man in polyester pants throwing breadcrumbs to the pigeons. They all seemed to nod at him, to say We know what you’ve been up to. He hurried into his building and up its ominously canted stairwell.

  In his apartment he hung his keys on the nail by the door. He didn’t expect an answer to his Hello. Lance usually slept past noon. In the last three days they’d barely seen each other: an hour while Jonah studied and Lance got ready to head out for the night. It would probably go like that all year long, nocturne and diurne.

  The shower ran brown as he scraped dirt and blood from his body; he ruined a washcloth getting it all off. The gauze on his elbow peeled back, revealing that he’d lost a patch of skin the size of a playing card. He used Band-Aids, Neosporin, and tissues to jury-rig a new bandage.

  As he got into bed, his cell buzzed: his chief excusing him for the day. Gratefully he set his alarm for three P.M. and sank beneath the blanket. Drifting off, he saw the face of the man he’d killed, contorting and whitening and accusing as he decanted himself through a hole in his throat.

  THE PHONE rang at two.

  “…hello?”

  “Hello is Jonah Stem there.”

  “…’s me.”

  “This is Christopher Yip from the New York Post, I heard about your heroic act last night and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, first how old are you and—”

  “Please—” His mind was soup. “I don’t want to ans—”

  “Where are you currently employed you’re a medical resident is that right?”

  “I do—I’m a student, not a resident. Please, I—”

  “When you stepped in to fight were you aware that he had a knife and if so—”

  “Excuse me, I’m hanging up.” As he did, he heard Do you expect a rewar—

  He disconnected the phone and rolled into a pool of sweat, hoping to recapture his nap. When that failed, he put on his bathrobe and shuffled out to fix himself breakfast (lunch?), so groggy that he almost tripped over Lance, crouching in the hallway.

  “Morning sunshine. I had a brainstorm last night. It’s gonna be fuckin brilliant.” Lance bit off a length of electrical tape and smeared it along the baseboards, sealing in a yard of computer cable. He crabwalked four feet and did it again.

  After a year and a half of roommateship, such a scene did not surprise Jonah in the slightest. “Okay,” he said and headed to the kitchenette, an unwalled area distinguished from the living room primarily by one’s imagination.

  “Last night”—bite, tape—“Ruby and I went to the Brooklyn Museum to see Rashomon, which by the way is a certifiable classic, it’s whack, have you seen it?”

  “No.” Jonah pawed through the freezer until he found a package of soy burgers, one of which he threw into the microwave unadorned.

  “You should. Anyway, as I’m watching it I’m realizing that the trend of the past like half-century has been to explore multiple perspectives, you know”—bite, tape—“documenting subjectivity. But we’ve gotten totally fragmented. We can’t focus anymore. Everywhere we go, there’s these people, these ideas, these images, moving a hundred miles an hour, and when do we ever see, I mean really see? We’re so ADD, look at me, I’ve been taking Ritalin since I was four.”

  “And snorting it since you were nine.”

  “Exactly.” Lance pulled the sofa out and crawled behind it. “To vanquish this, we need to look inside, back to fuckin basics. Especially considering nine-eleven, this seems like the path that our culture needs to go. It hit me like a nuclear warhead, or maybe a dirty bomb. Anyway I’ve been overthinking myself for months, dude, but now I see: it’s all about self. And as I’m thinking this, the craziest shit happens, the projector breaks down. Do you believe it? Asswipes.”

  “I’m sure you can get it on DVD.”

  “It doesn’t compare to the big screen, dude. No loss, though, as at that moment I understood something critical. And that is this: when the movie stopped, it stopped. That’s the difference between film and the actual flow of time. I said to Ruby, ‘This here shit is an all-too-clear reminder that our chosen medium is a construct.’ See? It’s a sand-eatingly artificial reduction of life to two hours and forty minutes. We limit ourselves, and as artists, that’s not cool. Hence.” From behind the sofa rose a fistful of cable. “Real-time cinema. I’m taking it to the next level. All me, all the time. Webcams in every room. It’s going to be a whole new genre of inward-looking cinema, a complete network of consciousness. And I have a great name for it, too, ready? Selfumentary. Is that dope or what?”

  Jonah didn’t think this was a very original idea. Lots of people had webcams. He wondered why Lance thought anyone would pick him over young women in the buff. But he knew better than to object. “The dopest.”

  In the seven years Jonah had known him, Lance DePauw had always swelled with protean ambition. At Michigan he’d burned through several career choices (sports commentary; video game design; and, for one hilarious semester, solid-state physics), each time failing to achieve world renown before h
is interest expired. His best idea—a beer-delivery service called Foam Home—had seen its knockout business model buckle under the weight of Lance’s decision to use all initial stock to throw Alpha Sigma Phi’s biggest party since the Kennedy administration.

  Jonah often got the sense that Lance had been born in the wrong era. He had a gift for throwing cash around, and would have done fine in medieval Florence, serving as patron to an impoverished sculptor; his passions trailed the zeitgeist like a banner flapping behind a propeller plane.

  These days, though, you were either talented or a conformist pussy, and no way would Lance content himself with the latter.

  It fell to Jonah to listen, respond, humor the air castles. He had practice as a listener; he’d done it all his life. Although at present he felt too frayed to contribute much more than Yes and No and Sounds cool.

  “You know what these camerabobs cost? Like twenty bucks. And they’re good, too, for their size. Like some shit out of Get Smart. That show was genius. Half the things they made up, you can get at Best Buy. Plus I’ll save money on film.”

  The microwave beeped. Jonah dumped the patty on a paper plate and added a dot of ketchup. Swooning with nausea, he leaned against the kitchen counter, watching his best friend run wires to the fridge, behind the fridge, in the fridge. He took a bite of burger, stifled a gag. “I thought digital was blasphemy.”

  “You got to take the sacred cows and machine-gun the cocksuckers,” Lance intoned. “You think Michelangelo gave a rat’s sack about tradition? Check it: this one’s wireless, on-the-fly roving broadcasts. Or we can put it in your room.”

  “That’s really okay.”

  “Yeah,” Lance said thoughtfully. “You’re right, I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to shift the focus off my protagonist.”

  Unable to stomach the burger, Jonah set it down. He rubbed his face. The man the woman the moon. To his great distress, they seemed to be sharpening, their colors acid-bright. There was the man, his breath a long-distance kiss, the knife. There was blood. He tried to stop thinking about it. Be human. Lance was watching him, still waiting for an opinion. If he opened his mouth, maybe it would go away.