Lowboy Read online

  “Bullshit,” Lowboy said, shaking his head. “Balls.”

  Everyone in the car was looking at him now. There were times when he was practically invisible, monochrome and flat, and there were others when he gave off a faint greenish glow, like teeth held up to a blacklight. When that happened his voice got very loud very fast and the only thing he could do was keep his mouth shut. The air outside the glass got darker. There were things he wanted to explain to the Sikh, to apprise him of, but he held his breath and pressed his lips together. He could keep himself from talking when he had to. It was one of the first things that he’d learned to do at school.

  “Who was that chasing you?” said the Sikh, propping his elbows on his beautiful sticklike legs. “Were they truancy officers?”

  Lowboy shook his head fiercely. “Not sent by the school. Sent by—” He caught himself at the last moment. “By a federal agency. To frighten me. To try and make me follow their itinerary.” He looked at the place on his wrist where his watch should have been, but there was nothing there, not even a paleness. He wondered if he’d ever had a watch.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. He turned measuredly around to face the doors. It was too warm in the car for sudden movements.

  The train seemed to hesitate as it came into the light. Its ventilators went quiet and its mercury striplights flickered and it rolled into the station at a crawl. The station was a main junction: six lines came together there. Its tiles were square and unbeveled, lacquered and white, like the tiles on a urinal wall. The only person on the platform was a transit guard who looked ready to fall down and die of boredom any minute. Lowboy frowned and bit down on the knuckle of his thumb. There was no good reason for the platform to be empty at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning.

  . . .

  The guard watched the train pull in out of his left eyecorner, careful not to seem too interested. The old school trick. Lowboy thought of the last glimpse he’d had of Bones, pounding on the glass and shouting at the conductor. He thought about Skull running alongside the train and making panicked circles with his arms. He looked at the transit guard again. Something was clipped to the inside of his collar and he held his head cocked toward it, moving his lips absently, like someone reading from a complicated book. Watching him made Lowboy want to lie down on the floor.

  “I made a mistake,” he said, turning back to the Sikh. “This isn’t my stop.”

  The Sikh seemed happy to hear it. “I suppose, then, that you ought to take a seat.”

  “I’ll tell you why they expelled me,” Lowboy said, sitting back down. “Do you want to know?”

  “Here comes the policeman,” said the Sikh.

  Lowboy turned his head and saw the transit guard hauling himself up the platform and glancing sideways into each car and mumbling into his collar. The doors remained open. No announcement was given. If the guard looked bored it was only because he knew about each event before it happened. Lowboy let his head rest against the window for a moment, gathering his strength, then eased his body sideways until his cheek touched the Sikh’s shoulder. The collar of the Sikh’s shirt smelled faintly of anise. Lowboy’s eyes started to water.

  “Can I borrow your turban?” he whispered.

  “You should go back to school,” the Sikh said through his teeth.

  “I wish I could,” said Lowboy. His left hand gave a jerk. The rest of the car was looking from the transit guard to Lowboy to the Sikh. Some of them were starting to get restless.

  “Do you have a family?” the Sikh said. He shifted in his seat. “Do you have anyone—”

  “Give me a hug,” said Lowboy. He took the Sikh’s arm and ducked underneath it. He’d seen the trick in the movies but he had no way of knowing if it worked. The anise smell got stronger. He saw the transit guard reflected in the windows and in the doors and in every set of eyeballs on the train. He buried his face in the Sikh’s leather jacket. The Sikh sucked in a breath but that was all.

  “Hello, Officer,” said the Sikh.

  As soon as the guard was gone Lowboy retched and leaned forward. The Sikh pulled his arm free as matter-of-factly as a nurse and smoothed out a crease in his pantleg. “I have a grandson in Lahore, in Pakistan,” he said. “You put me in mind of that boy.”

  “Was he a truant?”

  The Sikh smiled and nodded. “His name is Sateesh. A bad boy like you are. When he was sixteen—”

  “I’m not ready yet,” Lowboy said, tapping out a rhythm against his chest. “They never should have kicked me out of school.”

  The train began rolling and the niceties of life resumed, the breathing and the coughing and the whispering and the singing out of key. The singing especially seemed strange to him after the long awful silence but he was overjoyed to hear it. He hummed to himself for a little while, grateful for the rocking of the train, then took a breath and made his face go flat. What he had to say next was solemn and imperative and meant for the Sikh’s ears alone. He had nothing else to offer, either as a gesture or a covenant or a gift: only his one small discovery. But lesser gifts than that had saved men’s lives.

  “Your religion values sacrifice above all things,” he said. He caught his breath and held it. “Sacrifice is important. Am I right?”

  The Sikh didn’t answer. Lowboy had expected him to react in some way, to cry out or throw up his hands or give a laugh, but instead he kept his sallow face composed. He wasn’t looking at Lowboy anymore but at a girl across the aisle who was fussing with a pair of silver headphones. He no longer seemed wise or elegant or even clever. The longer Lowboy stared at him the more lifeless he became. It was like watching a piece of bread dry out and become inedible.

  “You’re drying out,” said Lowboy. “Are you listening?”

  It’s because of the heat, Lowboy thought. We’re all baking in it. The Sikh stared straight ahead like someone sitting for a portrait. He’s preparing himself, Lowboy thought. Mustering his resources. The Sikh would get out at the next station and move to another car, or transfer to a different train, or call the police, or even send a message to the school: Lowboy knew he’d do one of these things. But it was terrible that the Sikh would act in ignorance, without waiting until he’d received his gift. A worse setback could not have been imagined.

  All at once, without moving, without turning his head or taking in a breath, the Sikh said quietly and clearly: “What is your reason, William?”

  “My reason?” Lowboy said. He could hardly believe it. “My reason for running away, you mean?”

  The Sikh blinked his eyes idly, like a kitten sitting in a patch of sun.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Lowboy said. “Since you ask.” He leaned over. “The world won’t make it past this afternoon.”

  . . .

  The Sikh turned his head and regarded him now, though only his watery close-set eyes had life. Lowboy couldn’t be sure that he was listening, since he hadn’t yet said a word, but it seemed extremely likely that he was. The moment of revelation made a leisurely circuit of the car, glittering dimly in the air, then passed away without the slightest sound. Lowboy paid it no mind. The Sikh sat bent stiffly forward, bobbing his head impatiently, digging the heels of his pennyloafers into the floor. Fidgeting like the girl across the aisle. Why was everybody so impatient? It was true of course that time was running out. There were two transfers at the next station: an orange and a blue. Choices would have to be made. They were being made already.

  A hissing came off the rails as the train crossed a switch and the noise cut straight up through the car, hanging in sheets down the length of the aisle, as if to offer them a kind of shelter. Lowboy blinked and took a breath and said it.

  “The world’s going to die in ten hours,” he said. He shoved his fist against this teeth so he could finish. “Ten hours exactly, Grandfather. By fire.”

  The look on the Sikh’s face was impossible to make sense of. His body was the body of a somnambulist or a corpse. Lowboy closed his mouth and crossed his arms and nodded. It was difficult, even painful, to keep his eyes on the Sikh, to sit there and wait for the least show of feeling, to smile and keep nodding and hope for the one true reply. He decided to look at the girl with the headphones instead.

  She was sitting straight up in her seat, the perfect mirror image of the Sikh, as poised and geometric as a painting. The longer Lowboy looked at her the less he understood. His take on the girl, on the Sikh, on everything in the car refused to hold still any longer. His thoughts slid like mercury from one possibility to another. The spaces between events got even wider. They were empty and white. He forced himself to focus on the surface of things and on the surface only. There’s more than enough there, he said to himself. He let his eyes rest flatly on the girl.

  The girl’s hair was colored a dull shade of red, the shade dyed-black hair turns in the summer. It was cut in a way he’d never seen before, with long feathered bangs hanging over her eyes. When she leaned forward her face disappeared completely. Lowboy pictured a city of identical girls, all of their faces hidden, silver headphones plugging up their ears. He’d been a cosmonaut for eighteen months, a castaway, an amnesiac, the veteran of an arbitrary war. The world had gotten older while he’d been away. Away at school, regressing. He studied the girl’s hands, cupped protectively in her lap, hiding whatever the headphones were attached to. She seemed ashamed of her hands, of her lap, of her intentionally torn crocheted stockings. She’d hide her whole body if she could, he thought. He felt a rush of recognition. So would I.

  Her hands were chapped and pink, with short, ungraceful fingers, but there was something about her fingers that he liked. Only when she brought one to her mouth did he notice that the nails were bitten down to the cuticles, torn and unpainted, the nails of a girl half her age. Something worked itself loose in his memory. I’ve seen hands like that before, he thought. A backlit picture came to him then, a body reclining in midair, a sound that wasn’t quite a woman’s name. A few seconds more and he’d have remembered the name, even said it out loud, but before that could happen he made a discovery. The name and the backlit picture fell away.

  The girl across the aisle was smiling. She was smiling without question, blushing and parting her bangs, but the meaning of her smile kept itself hidden. “It’s the music,” Lowboy murmured to the Sikh. “There’s music in those headphones that she likes.” But even as the Sikh nodded back—blankly, disaffectedly—Lowboy saw he was wrong. The girl’s smile wasn’t private; it was unabashed and open. And she was smiling it at nobody but him.

  That made Lowboy remember why he’d left the school.

  Cautiously, as an experiment, he tried to smile back at the girl. He kept his eyes wide open and made sure to show her his teeth. The strangeness of what he was attempting made the roof of his mouth go numb. There’d been no girls at the school, at least not in his wing, and he hadn’t cared about girls before he’d been enrolled. But now he did care about them. Now they made him feel wide awake.

  “Don’t leer at her that way,” said the Sikh.

  “I’m not leering,” Lowboy said. “I’m being sexy.”

  “You’re frightening her, William.”

  Lowboy waved at the girl and opened his eyes wider and pointed at his mouth. Her smile went blank and stiffened at its corners and he adjusted his own smile accordingly. The girl jerked her backpack open and tilted her face forward, lowering her bangs like a shutter across a storefront. She gaped down into her backpack like a baby looking into a well.

  “Why won’t she take those fucking headphones off? I want to tell her something. I’ll sing it to her if she wants. I want to—”

  “The world will end?” the Sikh said. “Why is that?”

  Lowboy stopped smiling at once. What magnetism he might have had was neatly and resourcefully sucked away. The question had been meant as a distraction, nothing more: to keep him from establishing contact. To disarm him. The girl with the backpack receded and the Sikh slid quietly forward to take her place. He wasn’t the man that he had been before. The rest of the car went dark as though the Sikh were in a spotlight. There was no curiosity in his expression, no humanity, no love. He spoke in a completely different voice.

  “Your voice has changed,” said Lowboy. “I don’t think I can hear you anymore.”

  “Don’t trouble that poor girl any longer, William.” Behind his sparse discolored beard the Sikh was grinning. He raised his head and coughed and gave a wink. “Why not trouble me instead?”

  It was then that Lowboy saw the danger clearly. The fact of it hit him in the middle of his chest and spread out in all directions like a cramp. “No trouble,” he said. He said it effortfully and slowly, biting his breath back after every word. “No trouble at all, Grandfather. Go away.”

  The Sikh flashed his teeth again. “Grandfather?” he said at the top of his voice. He said it to the rest of the car, not to Lowboy. He was making a public announcement. He looked up and down the car, the consummate entertainer, and brought a shriveled hand to rest on Lowboy’s shoulder. “If I was your grandfather, boy—”

  His voice was still booming up and down the car like the voice of a master of ceremonies as Lowboy slid his hands under the Sikh’s beard and pushed. The Sikh lifted out of his seat like a windtossed paper bag. Who’d have guessed he was as light as that, thought Lowboy. The Sikh arched his back as he fell and opened his mouth in a garish slackjawed parody of surprise. A standpole caught him just below the shoulder and spun him counterclockwise toward the door. The booming was coming not from the Sikh anymore but from an intercom in the middle of the ceiling. “Columbus Circle,” Lowboy shouted. “Transfer to the A, C, D, 1, and 9.” No jokes anymore, he thought, laughing. No part of this is funny. A woman halfway down the car stood gasping in the middle of the aisle. He turned to face her and she shut her mouth.

  “Boy,” the Sikh said breathlessly. He was sputtering like the intercom above him. “Boy—”

  Lowboy got down on his knees next to the Sikh. “Sacrifice makes sense,” he said. “Would you agree with that?”

  The Sikh flashed his teeth and made thin meaningless noises and brought his hands together at his throat.

  “You’re worried about me,” Lowboy said. He shook his head. “Don’t worry about me, Doctor. Worry about the world.”

  The Sikh slid gradually backward until his head came to rest against the graphite-colored crease between the doors. His eyes transcribed a lazy mournful circle. His turban sat next to his elbow like an ornamental basket, still immaculately wrapped and cinched and folded. So that’s how they do it, Lowboy said to himself. They put it on and take it off just like a hat.

  “Boy,” the Sikh said again, forcing the word out with his tongue. It seemed to be the only word he knew.

  Lowboy bent down and took hold of the Sikh’s jacket. He could feel the little footballs grind together under his fingers. “It’s all right, Grandfather,” he said. “I’ve got something in mind.”

  Detective Ali Lateef—born Rufus Lamarck White—enjoyed anagrams, acrostic poems, palindromic brainteasers, and any cipher that could be broken with basic algebra. When case work was slow he amused himself by inventing simple alphabets, usually of the phonogrammic type, and using them to post com promising anecdotes from the life of Lieutenant Bjornstrand, his im mediate supervisor, on the Missing Persons Progress Panel above his desk:

  KJJH54DSG QWEJDJ88 65XPTH. GHY69DD HN53T UGH8?

  GH77!

  These notes were Lateef’s only eccentricity. In every other respect he was straightforward and obliging, and no one had ever, in that office where abuse was the only reliable sign of friendship, questioned his abilities on the job. His clothes, his race, even his lack of a wife were brought up almost daily, but his casework was never once made mention of. His case reports were passed around like textbooks. This was a source of deep and abiding satisfaction for Lateef, though he wouldn’t have admitted it to a single living soul.

  His embarrassment at his name was another thing Lateef kept to himself. No person, living or dead, had ever been made a party to it: not his colleagues, not his occasional drinking partners, and certainly not anyone in his family. His father, an MTA motorman known for most of his life as Jebby White, had rechristened all of his children on January 1, 1969, after changing his own name to Muhammad Jeroboam in front of the King’s County clerk. It had taken Rufus the better part of a year to pronounce his new name properly, and the sound of it still felt foreign in his mouth. Had he been old enough to decide for himself—had he been consulted in any way whatsoever—the change might have excited him, possibly even become a source of pride; as it was, he’d tried to come to terms with it for more than forty years.

  What bothered him most was the fact that his father was the least political man he knew. When the Motormen’s Local had struck in 1976, he’d returned to work after only two days, shambling and apologetic, a week before the official strike was ended; it had been easier for him to change his surname than to demand a living wage. Lateef’s father saw no contradiction in this, but he himself couldn’t think about it without taking something in his hands—a doorknob, a paperweight, the cast epoxy butt of his pistol—and gripping it until the memory subsided. He was a churchgoing man but forgiveness came slowly to him.

  His anger and his reticence made Lateef a man of solitary pleasures. His tastes ran to 78-rpm records, statesmen’s autobiographies, and single malt Scotch, preferably from the Highlands; the women he knew referred to him, sometimes dismissively, sometimes wistfully, as Old Professor White. He lived in a roomy but charmless walkup on the affordable side of Prospect Park, across from the stucco ramparts of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. His father and mother were both still living—improbably enough, with each other—on the opposite side of his block; when they left their windows open he could hear their threadbare squabbles word for word. Like his coworkers, his parents virtually never made reference to his work: he might have been a hit man, from the elaborate care they took, or a soldier in some unmentionable jihad. He might have been making people disappear instead of finding them.