Paul’s father worked in suicide prevention. He asked people to take a step back, please, and he made fun of their half-baked plans to drive into poles (nowhere, in that sandy little corner of New England, could you get up enough speed) until they laughed.
“My job is easy,” Paul’s father told him once, “because most people can’t kill themselves. Even if their lives are so grim that you think they should. Killing yourself is a freak show talent, like bending your fingers back onto your wrists or wriggling your earlobe. Suicide is either in your blood or it isn’t, and it probably isn’t. I’m paid to distract people from dog whistles.”
When Paul was 17 his mother died of a heart attack and six months later his father jumped off of one of the bridges.
“It’s not your fault,” said Paul’s girlfriend, a varsity cross country runner. He nodded with a squint as if he secretly disgreed, but he didn’t. Of course it wasn’t his fault. Without hearing any particular voice in his head he thought, Suicide is a gene.
*
On a clear day the tenements of South Williamsburg rose out of Brooklyn like a classroom full of brown and gray hands. After work Paul came at them from the same direction as the sun did, Manhattan, a train car lifting him over the ocean-blue East River Tarp. He was 26 and this glassy moment in April was-maybe-you never knew!-the last day of winter 2035.
Paul had left work too late again, 6:30, and now he had to ride the subway practically alone. His car was empty except for a girl who was a few years older than he was and a foot shorter. She sat cross-legged under the conked out “Next stop:” sign and she wore a black felt coat that fit her like a belgian waffle. As Paul nodded she slid her right hand from its square pocket, just enough to flash a pepper spray label at him. He wondered if it would be out of line to roll his eyes.
If Paul really wanted to mug her he’d know exactly how to do it now. She’d given away that she was right-handed and that her weapon was mace. If he leaped in from her right side then she wouldn’t have any torque-
He shuddered.
The doors squealed open and Paul ran out. He jumped from the rope net when he was only halfway to the ground, and in less than a minute he was at the medicine room out back of the deli.
“Witch doctor!” He shouted into the pockmarked white room as he entered.
The door handle on the opposite end snapped down and up and Gabriel made his entrance. Immaculate white apron, stethoscope on his neck, light brown hair pointing straight up at the ceiling. Gabriel was Paul’s freshman roommate from college (Gabriel had been a junior) and Gabriel didn’t think of himself as a witch doctor. Neither did Paul, or anyone else in the neighborhood; only politicians and lobbyists threw that term around with a straight face.
Gabriel took a clean syringe out of the cabinet.
“Are you sure you’re prepared for what you might learn-”
“Uh-huh.”
“Either way it turns out-” Paul thought Gabriel made his eyes smaller than they naturally were on purpose, displaying a crescent of eyelid on top so as not to seem wide-eyed.
“Be cool,” Paul said. When Gabriel said he’d gotten hold of the suicide gene test, Paul demanded it. If he came out clean he was going to ask Helen to marry him. And then finally put the dead parents fund (life insurance policy, house sale, etc.) to work. Paul was going to open an old-fashioned restaurant right on Broadway, not even in South Williamsburg but on the edge of it in between three different neighborhoods.
“Done,” Gabriel said, and Paul rolled down his white uniform sleeve.
“In my restaurant,” Paul said, “witch doctors will sit on their own paper-sheeted mattresses, no more standing up all day.”
“Paper sheets are for patients,” Gabriel said and Paul rolled his eyes as if the details were too much for him. They weren’t, actually. He knew about doctor’s offices; he’d been a US History major.
Afterward Paul didn’t wander around even though he felt like the not-cold weather was about to undress around him. Helen was waiting and he needed her in a good mood for the usual reason. He followed Ross Street along the noisy interstate trench for a few blocks and then turned with it, across some rumpled intersections, into the neighborhood.
“HELEN!” Paul yelled up from the sidewalk. Six floors above him a white hand waved unrhythmically-assent. By the time Paul had opened both taped-glass doors, the foyer bats had already flown to the second floor, then the third, because Helen was singing her ugly Christmas Carols and the bats couldn’t help themselves. Paul’s feet sprang off the linoleum step after step, corner after corner. “Siiiiiilent night, hooooooly night.” A dozen bats snapped their wings as hard and fast as if they’d just found out where heaven was. By the time he reached the 6th floor all the bats were smacking into each other up next to the roof door, fighting over who’d get to fly out the broken window first, and Paul was home safe.
*
Sunlight pitched a sharp shadow into the pentagonal alley next to Paul’s head, the top few feet of the irregular brick walls burning brown (a few odd shaped buildings bumped against each other back there). The alarm was going but outside wasn’t light enough.
“I set it early,” Helen mumbled. Paul rolled over and held her waist under the blankets. They didn’t do this enough, Helen said, because Paul was such a rigid sleeper: he lied straight on his back with his arms crossed on his chest.
“Like a bat,” Helen liked to say. It didn’t help that he had straight black hair neat as a fork. “But you’re one of the good ones.”
With his last few minutes of peace Paul thought about clams. Clams came in pearly soups and balls of dough and you ate them during windy twilights near 4 foot tall weeds that shuddered. Clam chowder (Rhode Island clam chowder-in other states people made it with cream) and clam cakes. “Clam dinner!” Paul’s mother would say. And pointing a bumpy clam cake at him for emphasis: “this is what you live here for. This is your heritage.”
Paul would part the weeds with his hands and his mother would say “there are ticks in there!” Sorry, Mom. He’d take his hands out of the weeds and they’d go straight again. Light brown pointing up at the sky. The ocean was on the other side of the weeds but he wasn’t looking for it. He was thinking it would be cool if the weeds went on forever. A world where the atmosphere bent around him as he strode through it.
Paul couldn’t work a smell into the memory. Paper towels, bug spray, burning pumpkin, his mother’s curly hair blowing into him?
Time to get up.
Paul dashed up Ross Street and underneath the shuttle, automatically ducking his face from a possible oil drip. At the deli he nodded through the plexi-glass to Gabriel’s brother Lyon, who tossed the usual-a blueberry granola bar-onto a napkin and into the lazy susan. Paul dropped a dollar into his side and Lyon spun the little birdcage of a mechanism 180 degrees. The security wasn’t necessary between the two, of course, but there was no quicker way to exchange the goods anyway.
But Paul could think of a more pleasant way! In the old days people used to pick out their food with their hands. The food was wrapped, so it didn’t even matter if people changed their mind and put it back. Then they showed it to the cashier and he just waited for you to get your money out, even though you already had possession of the food. It was dangerous, but on the other hand, it encouraged people to browse so they’d end up buying more. The store owner-as Paul had patiently explained to Lyon a hundred times-would be taking a calculated risk.
The rope net hung from the J platform to the ground at a 70 degree angle and stretched along the whole block, on both sides, protecting South Williamsburg in two ways at once: it blocked jaywalking and was safer than a rusty stairwell. Paul scanned for a clear path to the top among all the dark-jacketed spazzes shuddering their way up. When he found one he grabbed on and climbed up like a spider, twice overlapping with another person’s limb, but moving along fast enough that he didn’t impose.
At the top Paul turned around and held his arm out for an older woman. “My pleasure!”
*
Look at Helen clacking across the conference table! (It was a stage, functionally, but in the shape of an enormous conference table; and the kids sat around it in ring after ring of wheeled office chairs.) Helen was allowed to wear flats but she didn’t. “It wouldn’t be authentic,” she explained, so casually you almost believed that was why.
“An i-bank three-quarters full of women isn’t authentic, either,” Paul had shot back the second time she said that.
Paul and Helen worked for Birthright America, a program for the foreign-educated teenagers of American emigrants. The federal government hoped to lure them back once they’d gone to good schools somewhere else. They paid for the smartest kids to travel around the country for a month, and one of the stops was Wall Street.
Birthright was the best job out there for a recent grad besides nursing. Paul got in as a tour guide by keeping a perfect US History GPA and agreeing, when he applied four years ago, to be placed anywhere in the country. Helen got to be an actress for Birthright the same way, except her major was Dramatic Arts and she’d only finished two years ago.
“Allocate more capital to Microsoft,” Helen was yelling as she walked away from some other less pretty girls in suits. Her soft red hair lifted like a cape. “That means buy, people! Don’t just stand there, buy. Eff me if America isn’t going to lead the world into a new digital age.” She was looking into the dark mega-conference room and putting on a big confident smirk for digital revolutions. Paul knew she couldn’t see him but maybe she hoped he was out there, minute after minute choosing her over lunch.
Paul needed to think about why he trusted Helen. What if he just needed sex and singing for the bats so he saw what he wanted to see… a boring line of thought. Start over: why did he trust any of the people he did? He had always trusted the smartest people around him, like Gabriel the poor witch doctor and his father, who paid off his little house before killing himself. Helen fit that pattern. She had lots of ideas for his old fashioned restaurant, like putting in a bar off to the side where people ordered drinks even less formally than they ordered food at their tables.
“I’ve traveled all over the world,” Helen said on stage, “but I’ve never found anywhere that takes risks better than Wall Street USA.” She was holding a skinny glass of port in her left hand for the soliloquy. When they crossed the spotlights her lips and shoes flashed.
Trust was a calculation, Paul thought, backing toward the door so he could leave as soon as hunger struck. Trusting someone just meant you figured they’d do something for you eventually…
Helen hated Gabriel. Gabriel examined his neighbors’ gross bodies in Lyon’s deli, Helen thought, because he needed to look down on them, like a black cat pretending to be asleep on the highest surface in the room.
“How is it that people trust witch doctors,” Helen would say while reading the paper. She was parroting the lobbyists who said that the final three years of medical school were just as important as the first, unlicensed doctors caused death all the time, whatever.
The mass of kids around the table-about fifty of them-writhed like mussed velvet. Most spun a little in their spinny chairs, knocking knees and sitting on their feet. They were quiet, though; they were the best students in the world and they were here because their sentimental American parents wanted them to be.
Why did people trust witch doctors? Because they had to, Paul thought; witch doctors were the only affordable doctors.
Helen didn’t have to trust Gabriel because she’d never been sick and didn’t imagine she’d get sick any time soon. “I can’t help feeling like everything’s going to work out, like when I’m in my early 30s,” she’d confessed once under the blankets. Gabriel fell asleep. The next afternoon he realized he’d never be friends with Helen. Friendship happened when two people found out they shared a ghost. Helen was too earthy; she was, in essence, a partner.
Nothing would change Paul’s mind about Helen. That was the rock bottom truth. On his way out of the blackened conference room Paul caught his trailing foot in the door noisily so that Helen would know he had been there, watching her by choice.
*
After work Paul wasted time chatting up one of the security guards. Once everyone was gone he said he’d forgotten something in his locker. Back in the changing room he took out his uniform (a dark gray business suit) and switched it with Gary’s, a guy who wore the same size. Next he switched Helen’s uniform (a red skirt suit) with Malia’s. For the price of watching over people’s shoulders while they opened their lockers plus staying at work a little late sometimes, Paul had saved himself and Helen the cost of drycleaning forever.
An empty train carried Paul over the East River Tarp. He tried to figure out when a new tarp would be added. Was it the third Tuesday in April or the fourth?
In 2014 the state had drained and dammed the East River with federal stimulus funds. The project was supposed to pay for itself by collecting the fillings of rotted corpses at the bottom of the river. But oversight was lax and workers took the metal for themselves. Meanwhile, fumes were coming out of the open trench and longtime residents away from the area. Hence the exodus of Hasidic Jews from South Williamsburg and then, finally, the tarp. It was an imperfect solution. Every April a fresh tarp was added on top, stretching a few feet wider to cover new oozings.
In the white back room of Lyon’s deli Paul asked Gabriel for his test results.
“You’re clean, my man,” Gabriel said. “You’re going to live just about forever. How does it feel?”
“I feel like…” Paul said, glancing at his fingernails. “I have to start doing stuff so my life doesn’t suck!” Gabriel laughed, eyes pinched at the corners maybe more than they had to be.
“Good luck,” Gabriel said. “And not just with the restaurant!”
Their conversations had gotten cornier and cornier lately. In college they’d marvel at people who fell in love with each other just because they had decent sex together. Now Paul tried not to talk about Helen too much while Gabriel said things like, “seriously, I’m really happy for you.”
Outside the temperature hadn’t budged past 55; in fact spring was losing ground, and Paul tugged his coat closed has he hustled around a rope net.
*
The next day was Saturday.
“Let’s get brunch at a restaurant in the tourist district,” Paul said to Helen, “and talk about our old-fashioned restaurant.”
The line at 21 Wall ran onto the sidewalk and into the street.
“Our old fashioned restaurant will have to be big,” Helen said. “Since people will sit at the tables not just to eat but to wait for their food, and even to think about what food they want.”
“Agreed,” Paul said. “But we can also take reservations, or at least have a sign-in sheet so people don’t have to stand in a vulgar little line to keep their place.”
Once they reached the counter-a long shiny-wood thing with a green-shaded lamp at each end-Helen ordered eggs florentine. Paul almost ordered pancakes but then stopped himself.
“Do you serve the clam dinner at brunch?” The clerk, a guy about Paul’s age with even stubble, shrugged.
“I guess. We just need to microwave it.”
“Perfect.”
Paul and Helen shuffled into the restaurant’s lobby. A chandelier hung over the middle and a brass rooster was posted next to an ornate clock over the casheir’s stand. In the crowd they staked a place next to a tall potted plant. Now they were not surrounded by animals; on one side they bordered a vegetable. This felt better.
Finally their number was called and they shuffled up to the cashier’s stand. Behind the glass a man in white gloves placed a tray of food into the cashier’s lazy susan. Paul showed the cashier his bills and then placed them in his end of the blue-tinted contraption. A tint, how tacky! It was hard to decorate something whose two purposes are transparency and security.
Which was why Paul’s old fashioned restaurant wouldn’t have one.
Paul and Helen picked out a table in the back corner.
“What’s on top of my clam chowder?” Paul asked. Helen shook her head dumbly. “Chowder is supposed to be sort of like a soup, if I remember right…” He pried the edge of the bowl with his fork, then tapped the top anxiously. “This isn’t chowder, it’s clam pot pie!”
“Maybe chowder is really just a Rhode Island thing,” Helen said. Paul forked his way into the bowl. The pile of off-pink irregulars inside reminded him of disembodied butts. “It can’t be the restaurant’s fault. My eggs are great. Try some?”
A foreign smell was rising from Paul’s bowl. He felt nauseous. Imagine opening an old fashioned restaurant! Customers wouldn’t lounge around and order extra food all day, they’d eat their meals and then crawl out the bathroom windows without paying. You’d need security guards all over, which would cancel out any profits from over-ordering… The concept didn’t add up; that’s why old fashioned restaurants had shut down in the first place. Paul would’ve let it go years ago if Gabriel hadn’t encouraged him. Gabriel, who pretended to test Paul’s blood for some kind of suicide virus! Gabriel would influence Paul to do anything just to be able to feel-once Paul did it-influential.
Paul covered the clam pot pie with his napkin, leaned forward on his elbows, and grinned big. After all, opening an old fashioned restaurant wasn’t the only way he’d ever thought of to make money. It wasn’t even the easiest.
“You’re the best thing in the world!”
