The Apartment A Novel(30)

We all stayed another few days in New York. I had grown claustrophobic – the flags, the cops, the taxis, the increasingly self-aware symbolism of American resilience – but it was nice to see my mother and father in the same room, talking about bullshit and admiring their grandkids. One morning, my mother, my sister, her two older kids and I were in the kitchen. My sister’s husband was at work – it was a Sunday, but he always worked. It was a cloudy morning, and the leaves had changed, and the city was loud. My mother was cleaning the countertops for the tenth time that morning, and my sister asked her to sit down. My mother said, Just a minute. Sit down, said my sister. My mother was wearing an apron. She searched for something to wipe her wet hands on, then wiped them on the apron. Hold on, she said. Sit down, said my sister. You want me to go? I asked. No, said my sister. I poured myself an orange juice and leaned against the counter. Mom, said my sister, I know you’re busy at home, but I’m going back to work part-time soon, and I’d like you to move in and help with the kids. My mother pretended to address the problem of leaving, moving, responsibilities. Think about it, said my sister. The kids started screaming for her to move in. They pulled at her arms. I admired my sister. She asked no questions she did not know the answer to. She had a clear vision, not necessarily of what she wanted, but what she needed and how to get it. Her husband is a mean, greedy narcissist, with a thick New York accent and a sports car, and I’m sure he cheats on her, but when the marriage ends my sister will get everything, including the kids, and while he spirals into pathetic self-destruction she will find a way to be successful, proud of what she has accomplished, and remain a mother beloved by her children.

The day after that, my father flew back to St Croix. My sister made me promise to get him to JFK so early that he couldn’t possibly miss his flight. I drove him there and left him at the kerbside, and he said, I’ve got three and a half goddamn hours, I’m checked in already, and I have no bags to check. So I told him I’d park and come in. That morning the clouds had vanished after a week of dull weather, and it was clear – the sky was light blue and bright, and there was a touch of winter in the air. You hungry? he asked. Not really, I said. So we sat at the bar of a Mexican restaurant and he ordered a vodka on the rocks. It’s a bit early, I said. What does time mean to a guy who lives on a sailboat? he asked. Besides, how long’s it gonna be before we get another drink together? Okay, I said, and I ordered a beer. We sat at the bar and periodically looked up at the television, which was playing what the bartender told us was a Puerto Rican soap opera. I had a feeling this would be the last time I saw him. Or perhaps I knew for sure. I think I may have tried to take a picture of him in my mind, to memorize him exactly, so that I would carry the image all the way to my death, and think of him then, as a man in his late fifties, happy, drinking with his son at an airport, so that I could tell his memory goodbye. I did that with everybody in my family. But if that is what I’d tried to do with him, and with the others, I failed, because I can no longer picture them – I only see disconnected parts of them. He’s a tall man – six foot four, an inch taller than me – and shaves his head. He wears cheap baseball hats and sunglasses indoors. My mother wears large, thick glasses and has a cackle, and my sister has blue eyes, which exist as blue and hazel speckles in the brown eyes of her children.

I was living in Norfolk at that time, temporarily, after my return from reservist duty – actually in a little motel on the interstate outside Hampton. I had come back from Iraq with a little bit of money and an idea. When my mother left for New York, I moved back to the desert and prepared to return to Iraq as a private contractor, putting my business together, contacting people, selling my strategy, organizing my visa, tendering for jobs, drawing up contracts, working out my security. Every dime I had, I invested in my business, and my apartment was the tiniest shithole you could possibly imagine. It was in one of those brown-wood, two-storey blocks typical of that city, with a row of doors on the ground floor and a wobbly, uneven platform that you walk to reach the doors on the floor above it. I was on the ground floor. The light came through my green curtains in the way that daylight goes through water – underwater, you look up and see the light dappling and shimmering on the surface, but you look around and see the light is diffuse, and beyond it is a fathomless black mystery. That was what my place was like at times. I spent hardly any time there. I showered at a gym in the building where I rented my office. Across the street from my apartment was a halfway house, but except for the fact that they lived behind a high, barbed-wire fence, you could not have distinguished the inmates from anyone else in that neighbourhood. Poor blacks and poor whites, poor Latinos. Addicts. Prostitutes. Thieves. Gangbangers. Dealers. Murderers. Drunk drivers. Rapists. They just sat on benches and smoked cigarettes, and from time to time a fight broke out. I had some upstairs neighbours, a couple of very tall teenage kids who lived with their grandmother on the second level of the apartments, and they and their friends used to stand along the platform, smoke weed, and stare at them. What are you staring at? one might yell. The kids said nothing. Who knew what satisfaction they took from it? Then another inmate would start cursing, just screaming at the bench he was sitting upon. Then a few more would start screaming at my neighbours, telling them to mind their own business. Then, when my neighbours refused to relent, a hysteria swept through the inmates. One woman might start repeating, No, no, no, no, no, no, NO, louder and louder, longer and longer, until it became the ridiculous and unnervingly comical sound of a child refusing to eat, and then another might start weeping, and so on. This could last hours. Only when the staff could get the last man to calm down did my neighbours withdraw. Nobody ever gave me much hassle. I stayed out of everyone’s way. Perhaps they assumed, by the conservative cut of my hair, or the fact that I displayed no sign of madness or addiction, that I was a criminal of a higher class, the real fucking deal. Some Russian assassin. I worked that assumption and it may have kept me safe. Things happened in that building that would horrify the average middle-class person. I mean beatings, assaults, daylight robberies. I ignored it. I didn’t have a television or a radio, so I had to ignore it the old-fashioned way. I hummed to myself, or did push-ups. I had a girlfriend once who laughed at men who exercised to rid themselves of stress, and so I always laughed a little at myself doing those push-ups, but I was desperate. When there was nothing to do, I drank a lot of coffee. I had one of those Italian espresso makers you fill with water and put on a range, and I added cardamom to the grounds. The scent of cardamom reminded me of the coffee I drank in the Middle East, in Qatar, in Iraq, and my last hour there after my work on the FDE, in Queen Alia International, by myself, a sand-bound sailor on his way home, at the Four Seasons lounge, staring out the window toward the invisible city of Amman, which was buried in haze. I would travel right back through that lounge on my way to Baghdad as a civilian contractor. I must have gone through ten cups of coffee a day. Maybe that’s what the average American drinks. Usually I was in the office from five a.m. to midnight. My apartment was just a few blocks from the football stadium, so near that on Sundays the roar of the crowd seemed like a great godlike breath trying to blow us over. I had not specifically sought a place by the stadium, but I liked living there, because it fed my hatred of the kingdom of ambitious stupidity, of the loud and gruesome happenstance of American domination. I hated that noise, and that stadium, and I hated everyone in it, and I sat for long periods of time on a couch I’d bought for nothing at a flea market, listening to the celestial ecstasy of the dumb luck of being born American. That collective whoop. I hated that country and every man and woman and child and bug alive in it. I had no idea what I wanted in life then, but I knew that I hated America, and I wished that it or I did not exist. And while I thought this, on Sundays, the stadium responded with great, ecstatic, dumb breaths. And when I went to my office, I dressed in a decent suit and put an American flag on the lapel.