Ways and means, p.41
Ways and Means, page 41
He began, little by little, to pull away from Jay. He counted his money. He scanned Craigslist for apartments. With or without Mark he was getting out of here. He circled the day after the exhibition party in his mind.
Practically speaking he remained a dutiful assistant. He continued sitting in on the shoots and harassing media outlets. At long last he succeeded in getting a lukewarm response from the Grift. He wanted to avoid a scene with Jay, and he needed a few more $1,500 checks before he flew Howie’s nest. When he declined to participate in the Thursday gatherings Jay only assumed he was recovering from overexertion. He once asked Elijah, in all sincerity, if he’d sustained anal fissures.
Oddly enough, the one person who seemed to pick up on Elijah’s waning commitment was Herve. On the Fourth of July, the elder Gallion joined them for dinner and then stood with them on the terrace to watch the fireworks.
“Elijah,” Jay said, leaning perilously over the railing, “why didn’t we invite our boys over for a Fourth of July party? Feels like a missed thematic opportunity.”
Elijah felt Herve beside him, forbidding in his presence, fatherly in his understanding. When he noticed that Elijah had ignored Jay’s question he faced him, and his gaze seemed to recapitulate the gentle chastisement he’d meted out in the dining room. It seemed to say: Something bigger. Then his expression hardened and he turned away.
The fireworks began. Though they were being set off from the river they were visible through the intervening skyscrapers, and they were loud enough to rattle Elijah’s chest. He heard the bombs and saw the lights, shrank from the cannonade and marveled at the explosions. He was amazed, as he’d been on this day every year since childhood, that such violence could be the source of such beauty.
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Four hours after the Grift writer had left, the first of Jay’s Thursday night acolytes arrived. Elijah listened to them parade in from his bedroom. He chided himself for not sneaking downstairs earlier to grab a sandwich from one of the platters. He settled in for a long night of lying hungrily in his bed, fending off sounds of depravity from below.
He opened his laptop. Over the past week he’d bookmarked a dozen Craigslist apartments, all with leases starting July 15, the day after the exhibition party, all miniscule and criminally priced. A $1,600 one-bedroom in Crown Heights with drooping ceilings and a refrigerator in the hallway. A $1,400 studio in Inwood that overlooked, according to Google Street View, an abandoned lot strewn with weeds and single-use plastics. A $1,300 studio on the Upper East Side whose astonishingly reasonable cost was explained by the fact that it shared a bathroom with two other units. He skimmed the few unanswered emails that had come into his freelance inbox and realized with a shudder that he’d have to triple, possibly quintuple, his productivity to afford even these jerry-renovated digs. He saw his future. His long sojourn in the land of other people’s wealth, a land he’d never belonged in and never made any lasting claim to, had come to an end. Yet he couldn’t deny his relief. He was tired of mooching, of entrusting his security and satisfactions to other people and their unpredictable whims. He had to make a life, by himself and for himself, and he had to start somewhere.
He passed the night fitfully, kept from sleep by the music and guttural moaning below, with only thoughts of Mark to console him.
The next morning Jay knocked on his door. Elijah opened it only a crack. He wanted to hide his now halfway-filled moving boxes, the toiletries that like a hotel guest he’d begun keeping in a dopp kit, all the evidence of his imminent departure. He feared not that Jay would be angry but that he’d be smooth: that he’d try to persuade Elijah to stay and would succeed. He remained the person who knew Elijah best, who loved him most unconditionally, who understood his weaknesses and how to exploit them.
“I’m looking through yesterday’s footage,” he said to Elijah. “I want your input.”
“You’re the artist,” Elijah said.
“I need your eyes. I rely on them!”
“My eyes are struggling to stay open. There was a lot of noise last night.”
Jay cocked his head. “Am I sensing a loss of enthusiasm?”
“Only a loss of sleep.”
“Well, rest up,” Jay said. “The big day is almost here.”
Elijah spent the afternoon packing happily in his room. But by four o’clock he felt stir-crazy. The exhibition party was only six days away but it felt months away, it felt years away; he wanted to leave now.
He put on his running gear and managed to escape the penthouse unnoticed. He started down Forty-second Street and followed routes every sane runner avoids: through Times Square, around Columbus Circle, along the carriage-clogged border of Central Park. But he was keen to see people, crowds of new faces, great big chunks of the world he’d soon rejoin. After crossing the island and wending his way back he stopped on the west side pier next to the Intrepid. He looked at the scruffy banks of New Jersey.
He took out his phone. Years before, in the prime of his and Mark’s relationship, Elijah had saved all the Landmessers’ birthdays to his calendar, and earlier that day he’d received an alert reminding him that today was Janet’s. He navigated to her Instagram. Surely the family was celebrating, surely Janet was documenting it, surely she’d lassoed Mark into at least one frame. But Elijah saw no sign of him. Janet had posted only one photo, an uncharacteristically cheerless selfie with Arty in front of a building that Elijah recognized as the Ridgefall Country Club, and since then she’d posted no more. Nonetheless Elijah could picture the scene vividly: Mark standing stiffly in a corner of the club’s dining room, masticating canapés with all the gaiety of a dying cow, wishing he were anywhere else. Elijah, sweating on the pier, all but doubled over at the sweetness of this image.
He took the last few blocks to the Die Kinder at a walk. His mind was so filled with his vision of Mark, so disconnected from the pedestrian reality around him, that he didn’t notice the young man crossing Forty-second Street and bounding toward him. He didn’t notice him hopping up onto the sidewalk and following him. He was only shaken from his revery, fifty yards from the Die Kinder’s entrance, when he heard a sharp whisper.
“Elijah.”
When Elijah turned and saw the face behind him he assumed that he was only imagining it, that his mind had simply shuffled to another vision. But the face, unmistakable, refused to dissolve. Standing on the sidewalk, in a black baseball hat and sunglasses, was Alistair McCabe.
“Come,” Alistair said, beckoning with his hand. “Quick.”
Elijah stood still. He looked toward the few other pedestrians nearby as if to confirm the reality of what he was seeing.
Alistair stepped forward, grabbed Elijah’s hand in his own very real one, and tugged. He glanced fearfully at the Die Kinder. “Let’s go.”
He led Elijah down the block, across Twelfth Avenue, to a bench overlooking the river. “Face the water,” he said.
Alistair was paler than Elijah remembered, his hair less lustrously blond, but it was him, the fugitive in the flesh. Elijah turned to the river and hissed: “What are you doing here?”
“Is there a chance any of them will come this way?” Alistair said. “Herve? Jay? Howie?”
Elijah shook his head dumbfoundedly. “None of them strike me as river gazers.”
Alistair fidgeted on the bench. “I’ve been casing that block for days now, waiting for you,” he said. “Do you never leave the penthouse?”
Elijah found the clarity of mind to be miffed by this. “Why are you waiting for me?” he said. “What are you doing? Where have you been?”
“I need your help,” Alistair said.
Elijah’s stomach turned. “With what?”
“You need to believe me.”
“Believe you about what?”
Alistair moved closer, bent forward, and, in a long, unbroken, ten-minute whisper, told Elijah what. Elijah kept his eyes on the river the whole time, creasing his brow in confusion and then, as Alistair went on, feeling the blood drain from his face. The details were terrible upon terrible, and Alistair, in his breathlessness, gave Elijah no time to absorb their shock. No sooner had he finished telling Elijah the truth of Herve’s project than he began explaining about the groundskeeper and what had happened to him. No sooner had he finished telling Elijah about the men who’d broken into his house in Binghamton than he began describing, as he best he could, the nightmarish future Herve wanted to usher in.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Elijah said.
“I’m sorry to unload this on you,” Alistair said. “And I’m sorry for what I’m about to ask you.”
Elijah could only breathe. Pedestrians continued bizarrely to mosey around them. The sun continued bizarrely to shine.
“I have a plan to stop him,” Alistair said. “To make sure he pays for what he did and make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else. But I need your help.”
Elijah pitched forward. Clearest in his mind now, clearer than anything Alistair had just told him, was the image of Herve’s face in the dining room, and the sound of his words: Something that’ll really shake the world.
Alistair spoke in another unbroken whisper. The plan he described was so horrifying to Elijah that he disobeyed Alistair’s order and looked at him. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’ve worked it out, I think it’s as airtight as can be,” Alistair said. “And it’s the only way.”
Elijah turned back to the water. “No,” he said. “I can’t do this. You don’t want me to do this.”
“I do,” Alistair said. “You can. I believe in you.”
Even as Elijah shook his head, even as his fear coursed through him in cold bursts, he saw that he was not in fact the worst candidate for the job. He’d told Herve he was hopeless; he’d told him he was only a vessel. He’d made evident that he wanted, as Herve had told him to want, something bigger. Yet his fear remained absolute.
“And you won’t be alone,” Alistair said. “Take out your phone.”
Elijah made no movement, only glanced at Alistair in confusion.
“Call him,” Alistair said. “We need his help. Call Mark.”
Elijah shook his head again. “No,” he said.
“He’ll help us. He won’t want you to do this alone.”
“No.”
“You belong together. You know it, he knows it, I know it. He’ll come. He won’t let you do this by yourself.”
“No.”
“Call him,” Alistair said. “Do it now.”
In his fear Elijah couldn’t help it: he really could only imagine carrying out Alistair’s plan with Mark, ever his ballast, ever the pole to his tetherball, at his side. But even as he obediently took out his phone, even as he replayed Alistair’s words and felt the stirring of a tremulous hope—and even before the confounding call that in the next moment took place—he saw that his hope was foolish. Alistair wasn’t just bringing him and Mark back together. He was bringing all three of them back together, with their same divided loyalties, their same conflicting affections. He saw, as he put the phone to his ear, that the days ahead would be very difficult.
PART FIVE
ON THE MOUNTAIN
Alistair had been staying at the Millennium Hilton for only nine days, but already he felt like a resident. He knew when the lobby was least likely to be crowded, he knew which vending machines were broken, he knew the security guards and front desk staff by name, and they knew him by name too. “Good morning, Mr. Miller,” they said to him. “Mr. Miller, good to see you.”
Every time Alistair had to use the fake credentials Nikolai had given him he was surprised by how well they worked. The ID worked at the hotel desk and the liquor store. The debit card worked at the grocery store and the odd little security equipment store where he’d bought the Wi-Fi–enabled voice recorder. He wasn’t sure how much Nikolai had loaded onto the debit card, so he’d also brought with him the $10,000 in cash he’d retrieved from Mark’s apartment back in May—what felt like an eternity ago. So far he’d held off on setting up a new bank account into which to transfer the million Nikolai had set aside for him. He was waiting to establish himself in a permanent place, wherever that was, whenever that would be. Before leaving Binghamton he’d given Maura all the information she’d need to access the other two million and instructions for how to disperse it.
He had no idea if his plan would work. As he left the hotel now and emerged onto noon-bright Church Street various contingencies and worst-case scenarios crowded his mind. Yet he’d run out of time to backtrack. Jay’s exhibition party was tomorrow night; everything had been set in motion. At the very least, he believed, the scheme he’d devised put Elijah in minimal danger.
He walked north, looking at the spreading wings of the Oculus, the line forming at the entrance to the 9/11 Memorial, the sun smacking off windows and bright limestone walls. With any luck, after tomorrow he’d never see the city again.
He stopped at a convenience store to get more ibuprofen and new bandages. He stopped at a grocery store and filled two cartons at the hot bar. Even according to his own most paranoid calculations a food run here and an errand there posed a fairly minute risk. His disappearance had never become news, not even an alert on NYU’s public safety listserv, and if Herve had ever looked for him in the city he’d surely given up some time ago. Nevertheless, wherever he went, he wore his black baseball hat and kept his sunglasses on. For his part he thought he looked awfully conspicuous. But the people he moved among were harried lunch-takers, consumed in their phones, in the work they’d abandoned and to which they would soon return, and no one ever gave him a second glance.
He’d picked a hotel in the Financial District precisely because the neighborhood was so anonymous. Few regular dwellers here, mostly tourists and commuters, no one who would remember his face if he or she happened to see it twice. At night, after the office workers and visitors had dispersed, the streets looked almost abandoned. For all its majesty nobody seemed to want to live here. These few hundred acres had once transacted much of the world’s capital, but they offered no solace, no warm refuges or soft surfaces, nothing out of which to fashion a home.
On his way back to the hotel he stopped at a liquor store. He handed over his ID with studied coolness, and as he slipped it back into his wallet he glanced at the name and balked again at the coincidence. Of all the first names Nikolai could have chosen—of all the names! He was led to wonder if Nikolai had been guided by the prankster hand of God.
Alistair hadn’t heard from Nikolai, and he doubted he’d ever hear from him again. Surely he was in Indonesia by now, sunning his pale flab, drinking clear spirits, catching the eyes of passing women and foreclosing any chance of action by the adolescent goofiness of his smile. Surely he was lonely, surely he missed his friend. Alistair only hoped he knew how much his friend missed him back.
When he returned to the hotel and reached his floor he made his way past his own room to the second one he’d booked five days earlier. He knocked first, then slid in the keycard and entered. He still hadn’t gotten over Mark’s face.
“Meds, food, liquor,” he said.
“Bless you,” Mark said. He lay on the bed, propped against an assemblage of pillows, nursing his wounds. The bruises on his cheeks had passed their peak darkness, the cuts under his eyes were healing, his nose was gradually returning to its precontusion size, and to judge by his restored mobility no bones were broken.
Alistair passed him the ibuprofen and bandages and one of the cartons of food. “Are you feeling better?”
Mark opened his carton, forked a potato, and chewed on the side of his face that his brother hadn’t repeatedly clocked. “Now that you’re here,” he said.
Five days earlier, after Mark had finally called Elijah back and, in his post-beating daze, agreed to come to the city, Alistair had opted to book him a room of his own, lucking into one on the same floor. (The Millennium had turned out to be a rather shitty hotel with an advantageously high vacancy.) Alistair had done this mainly out of respect for Elijah. He’d determined that it would be best for Elijah to continue staying at the Die Kinder for as long as possible, to ward off any suspicion, and he didn’t want Elijah spinning masochistic fantasies about what might result from Alistair and Mark sharing a room while he was away. But Alistair’s discretion had been for naught. Every night since his arrival Mark had tiptoed down the hall. He spent his days healing in his own bed but he never slept in it.
“Any calls from the family?” Alistair said.
“Eleven from my mom, three from my dad.”
“That’s less than yesterday.”
“I think they’re starting to give up.”
“And Eddie?”
“Still nothing.”
Alistair had pretended to be stunned by the story of Mark’s mother’s birthday party and all the sordid business that had led up to it. But in truth it had only confirmed things about the world he already knew. “Do you think you’ll ever talk to them again?” he asked.
“I’m not thinking about them,” Mark said. “You’ve given me other things to think about.”
“Are you nervous?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Alistair avoided his gaze. The first knock at his door had come Friday night, just hours after Mark had showed up at the hotel in his bloody tux. His body was still throbbing, his wounds were still swelling, his bones still felt out of place. But he’d spent two months waiting to hold Alistair in his arms and he refused to delay any longer, even if in his condition he couldn’t really hold Alistair, couldn’t really do much at all. Every night since then, as he’d recovered, he’d gotten more insistent, more dexterous and ambitious, but he still hadn’t gotten what he wanted. The problem was their bodies and what they were and weren’t willing to do with them. They were doomed in their stubborn tophood. And the thing Mark really wanted, a life together, Alistair had told him was impossible.
