Charles Platt by New York Times

Author:New York Times [Times, New York]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-21T13:57:01+00:00

Out of the subway walking home on First Avenue. Almost empty even at the allnite grocery marts. The night is taking hold, gripping hard.

A foretaste: heavy figures approaching me on the sidewalk. The pair of them space out either side of me as they come closer.

—Do we hit him, Frank?

The long space of three footsteps.

—No.

They pass. Into the darkness.

Along the black-and-blue canyon of 10th Street, skirting tumbled garbage, congealed vomit, rusting fenders, Coke bottles, iron bars, smears of excrement dehydrated and brittle on the dead concrete.

The footsteps start behind me and I run, fire escapes rusty trees skeletal hands parading overhead under the smeared moon. The tripwire gets me across the shins, bites in, scrapes the skin off like pink apple peel. My face goes down mashing into a rusty can. Studded boots march braille into my back.

Inside the building, past the broken-open mailboxes, the junkie slithers out from under the stairs, trembling knife point aimed at my throat. I stumble-run up the stained steps, lungfuls of urine-tainted air, lightbulbs dancing, chest aching, slam the steel-paneled door behind me with a heart-beat to spare.

Lying on the dusty floor of my empty apartment where the furniture used to be. Dream-images of half-sleep. Then I sit up tense and alert, burglar’s hacksaw carving through the window bars, one lunge and I get him in the throat with my sawn-off pool cue. He tilts slowly like a high diver off the ten-meter board, falls turning, splashes onto the hard black road.

Down there, streetlights glint on upturned eyes of ten thousand criminals and hoodlums, gathered together silently gazing up hungry and waiting.

And even as I try to slide the iron bar of the police lock into its catch, the door shudders in against my palms and clumsy fingers let the bar slip. Doorknob in the groin punches me backward. His broken bottle carves my chest, blood welling up like water rising in grooved wet sand.

They strip me as they strip an automobile: clothes, wristwatch, shoes, teeth, eyes, ears, scalp, fingers, limbs, spleen, heart …

Gutted, they cram me through a drain grating into the sewers. I slide easy, into the slimy, greasy, fetid water of the river; roll into the riverbed in a flowering puff of powdered excrement that settles back down in an even blanket, softening, blurring, obliterating.

*

The sun was bright and clear when I awoke the next morning. I left her still sleeping, went and poured fresh pasteurized orange juice, cereal with vitamins enough for another twenty-four hours of my existence.

I felt good.

I looked outside. Sunlight had miraculously erased the darkness again. Night’s black ocean tide had withdrawn, leaving only an occasional piece of driftwood on the sidewalk shore: a bloodstained shoe, length of bent water pipe, a crushed hypodermic.

The radio news said the Empire State was bombed out again; the black surface of 7th Avenue had turned to jelly, clogging the subway beneath; and we were warned of intermittent showers of blood in the late afternoon.

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