Little Disasters Page 3

  Speakers crackle to life. A tinny voice, transistor radio hiss and scratch, swells in the station, bouncing off the tunnels. After an earlier incident, all train service is suspended in both directions. Please seek alternative transportation. I haven’t heard that announcement before. I’ve never heard the subway people tell us that we are shit out of luck and should see if we can’t hail a cab instead. The half dozen of us waiting on the platform look at each other for answers, for reasons. Then everyone assembles back at the elevators, silent and sepulchral, to make our way back to the street.

  Draining my battery a bit more, and cursing myself for not thinking to do this when I was lost in the park, I call up my map on my phone, pinpointing myself and zooming in and out to find another subway. If the A train isn’t running, hopefully the 1 train over at Dyckman is. Which train doesn’t matter, I’m going to transfer anyway once I get to a line that will send me back to Brooklyn. Keeping my phone out so as to follow myself (actual Michael doing the running, blue-dot-Michael rolling at a steady clip toward his destination), I race to the Dyckman station, this one luckily aboveground. No elevators at Dyckman, which, in my manic state, I take as a good sign. As I’m running up to the platform I nearly collide with a woman coming down the stairs. She has a baby strapped to her chest, and she recoils from me, taking two quick steps back up. The child’s legs dance a spastic jig in its sling. “I’m so sorry,” I say to her. She walks by me without acknowledging my apology. “I’m sorry,” I call out again.

  Some terrible bubble just burst in me. A pinprick found its way through a membrane and now my sense of unease overwhelms me. It cuts my strings. I sit down on a step for a minute, catch my breath. I need to get back to Brooklyn.

  I need to get back to Brooklyn now.

  Standing back up, I take my place in the crowd. The platform has the same smattering of confused commuters, but it’s aboveground. They’re all on their phones.

  After an earlier incident, all train service is suspended in both directions. Please exit the station. The voice sounds urgent, clipping its consonants. A few people immediately obey, rushing past me with their phones at the ready. The rest of us wait, either out of obstinacy or some misguided faith in the New York subway system. We each have at the ready some anecdote from a night long ago when we were drunk and it was late and we were just trying to get home and they said this train wasn’t running but, like, thirty seconds later it rolled into the station and everyone who left was fucked but I got home, no problem. That’s what we’re holding out hope for, the phantom train that will appear and open its doors to us, welcome us into its air-conditioned intestine and shoot us through the pipes wherever we want to go. The announcement comes again, this time even louder, as if the station agent is shouting into the microphone, hoping to herd us out with her voice, but we’re not budging. I’m not budging. I have to get back to Brooklyn.

  Five minutes later I hear the same announcement shouted at me from down the platform. A woman in a maroon vest and parachute pants, sweating as badly as we are, yells at all of us, with only her annoyance as amplification.

  “Trains are not running,” she says, enunciating each word, like we’re simple. “I need you to leave the station.”

  “Is the A running?” a man yells back. He came from down the platform and seemingly waited until he was right behind me before shouting.

  “No trains are running. Not here, not anywhere. I need you to leave the station immediately. Come on.” A few more people start to trudge toward her. She beckons the rest of us, me included, with her hip cocked. “There’s not going to be a train and I need this station evacuated right now. If you don’t leave I’ll have you arrested.” No mincing those words, and we last few stragglers make our way to the exit. On the way past, I slow down, meet her vexed eyes with a look of incredulousness in my own.

  “How do I get back to Brooklyn?” I ask. That earns an eye roll. “What’s going on?” I prod, as if a reason will make the situation any better.

  “I don’t have any further information at this time,” she says officiously, actually pushing me in the back to keep me moving along.

  We mill about outside the station. We loiter under awnings, taking what little refuge we can from the cruel heat now that the sun has fully risen. If this were an airport, we’d start discussing our destinations, seeing if anyone wants to go in on a car rental, travel quicker alone but farther together. Some of the faces seem genuinely troubled, more than inconvenienced, as if the trains will never work again and we are stuck here on Dyckman Street in unbearable heat, commanded to ford the Hudson if we are to get anywhere ever again. I wonder, briefly, if my face mirrors theirs, if my look is also one of unenlightened fear.

  Separating from the crowd, I retrace my steps in the hopes that, if I make my way back to the subway I emerged from, I might somehow go back in time and not come up here in the first place. But I need to get back to Brooklyn—there’s no way around it. If the trains aren’t working, I will seek out the slow, monotonous, but ultimately reliable trudge of a bus. Back to Brooklyn. Back to … I check that last text again … back to Jenny Sayles.

  Michael Gould

  One Year Ago: July 18, 2009

  −4:00 hours: I’ve read as much of my book as I’m going to. It was a struggle four chapters ago. When Rebecca picks up a book, she finishes it, turning pages at a steady rate. I timed her once, without her knowing. A page turned every thirty-three to forty-six seconds, probably determined by how much dialogue is offset, or those end-of-chapter pages. I, meanwhile, hit a wall; it becomes physically arduous to move my eyes from line to line. There’s another guy in the waiting room, wearing a thin white linen shirt and a tank top underneath. He hasn’t done a thing but sit still since I got here. As far as I know, this is just his hangout, or one of the nurses is his girlfriend. He keeps glancing at me, I can see in my periphery, like he’s aching to strike up a conversation.

  I put the book down and pick up some pamphlets on child care off the end table. They’re divided into the categories of shit you should do for your baby and shit you should do for your baby for the love of God. The first set comprises step-by-step instructions on how to install a car seat, at what age vaccinations are needed, numbers you can call for postpartum depression. The second category is made up of pamphlets on the dangers of secondhand smoke to an infant, as if any asshole is going to see that in tri-fold format in the waiting room and put two and two together. Here’s the kicker, so amazing to me that I almost want to finally turn and acknowledge this other guy just to get his take on it. The people in the instructional pamphlets, they run the ethnic spectrum. But the people in the warning pamphlets—uniformly dark. The cartoons all have brown or black skin. Jesus Christ.

  −3:00 hours: A nurse comes into the waiting room. “Michael Gould?” she calls out. I raise my hand and she beckons me over to the nurses’ station. There she runs through the details of inducing labor, like a flight attendant reciting safety features. I catch every third word, and the words aren’t particularly complex or jargony; blood has broken the levy and flooded my brain and the next thing I know I’ll be able to do cogently is hold my son and probably sob. So I nod, and make polite hums of understanding whenever her voice goes up at the end of sentences. She smiles and I actually shake her hand, like we’ve concluded a transaction. Then I sit back down. She shuffles my chart to the back and lays another one over it. “Paul Sayles?” she calls out. The other guy leaps to his feet. “It’s Fenniger,” he corrects politely. She checks the chart and then looks at him again. “I’m Paul Fenniger,” he continues. “Jennifer Sayles is my partner.” Aha, she nods, then guides him to the desk for what looks like the same speech.

  −2:00 hours: I’m out of granola bars and two of my three bottles of water are gone. I’ve thrown them out, which was idiotic, because now I can’t refill them from the water fountain. I try picking my book back up, get through the same paragraph four times, and tuck it back into my backpack. I close my eyes, lea
n my head against the chair, and divide up my son into small parts. I hope he inherits Rebecca’s eyes but my mouth. Rebecca has thin lips that are going to get thinner as she ages. Mine are fuller. I want him to have my mouth. Rebecca’s ears. Rebecca’s nose. My jawline. My hairline. My height. Rebecca’s skin. Rebecca’s generosity. Rebecca’s optimism. Rebecca’s entrepreneurial spirit. Rebecca’s fortitude. Rebecca’s obstinacy. Rebecca’s perfectionism. Rebecca’s monomaniacal, myopic ability to latch onto a goal, clamp down her jaws, and twist until she feels its bones give way. My sense of humor. My elegant piano fingers. Rebecca’s kneecaps.

  −1:00 hours: Sitting. Sitting. Waiting. When a nurse, any nurse, emerges from those sliding doors, her eyes don’t go anywhere near the waiting room. They all keep laser-guided focus on the desk. Sometimes they go there and joke with the other nurses, trilling laughs of the islands and the barrios blending together. Sometimes they disappear to another part of the hospital, return ten minutes later. Dr. Mulitz comes out twice, stands at the entrance to the waiting room the first time. Both the other guy and I look directly at her and she holds our gazes for a few seconds too long, a tiny smirk playing at her mouth. “Nothing yet to report for either of you, I’m afraid. It’s going to be a long night. But your wives are both doing great.” The second time she just smiles at us both on her way to the desk. On her way back she says in a saunter-by-shouting, “Hold tight. I’ll be out as soon as I have something to report.”

  −0:03 hours: I walk up to the nurses’ station. The woman behind the desk doesn’t look up, though she clearly senses my presence, if not my stench. Rebecca says that I’m a shower-twice kind of guy when the temperature gets past eighty. “Excuse me,” I say, so gently, as if to not wake her up. She looks up more haughty than weary, preparing to test for how few words she can let me get out before she tells me that there’s no news and when there is news Dr. Mulitz will be the one to deliver said news. So I jab her first. “Can I smoke?”

  “Not on hospital grounds.”

  “I know. I mean, do I have time, do you think?”

  Her face relaxes into something akin to pity. “You have a cell phone on you?” I write down the number on a pamphlet (The Hazards of Shaken Baby Syndrome, for fuck’s sake) and she promises to call me in the next twenty minutes if anything is up. Then she adds, “You can’t smoke within fifteen feet of hospital grounds.”

  I walk half a block and stand outside of a Baptist church, the sun starting its descent, the temperature still inhumane. I’m about to light up when the other guy comes jogging across the street. “Hey.” He nods to me.

  “Something up? They need me?”

  “No. No, sorry. Look, I’m sorry to be that guy—” he starts, and I cut him off by handing him the pack. There’s not a noble reason to bum a cigarette off of anyone, I don’t know why people bother to ask with such an apologetic tone. I light his cigarette for him and he sucks in deeply. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  We stand and face each other for a few puffs. He looks at the sky, as if searching for an explanation for this heat, steps out of the way of a few passersby. “They told me it can take more than a day from when they induce,” he says.

  “I know. Christ.” I can see the outline of a tattoo on his shoulder through the thin fabric of his shirt. He’s bigger than I am, rangier. He’d fight one weight class up from me. Handsome guy now that I’m looking at him. He’s got the toast stubble and a sharp nose. “Mine is getting induced.”

  “Mine too.” He bobs his head.

  “Guess they bundle those together. Maybe they have an inducement team of nurses.” This doesn’t even warrant a response, but his face constricts, as if he’s trying to determine whether to give me one anyway. “I admit, I have no fucking clue what any of this entails.”

  He belches a laugh of smoke. “Me neither. I keep thinking of movies and TV shows and all I know is that babies get delivered in elevators.”

  I toss him a smirk like a coin. You earned that, handsome fella. “I’m guessing this is your first.”

  “Yeah.” He smiles sheepishly. “You?”

  “That it is.”

  “I’m Paul.” He switches the cigarette and extends his hand to me.

  I shake it. “Michael. You live around here?”

  “Oh no.” He laughs. “Park Slope? Couldn’t afford it even if I wanted to. You?”

  “Me and my wife live in Red Hook.”

  “That’s a nice neighborhood.” He nods.

  “Up and coming,” I reply.

  “Greenpoint,” he offers.

  “Oh, I want to get up there more. I hear good things. How nice it is.”

  “Up and coming.” He smiles again. “Far from here, but Dr. Mulitz …”

  “I know. She’s their cult leader.” We chuckle, stand awkwardly for a few beats. “So, Paul, what do you do?” That’s the next question on the New York checklist. First is where you live. Then it’s what you do. If I approve of both of those, we can continue the conversation.

  “I’m an actor,” he answers. Adds, almost but not quite an afterthought, “And a paralegal. You?”

  “I’m an artist. A painter.” I tack on an addendum of my own. “And I work in construction.”

  We share a conspiratorial grin. “Everyone gets to be a slash these days. Great economy, huh.”

  “One thing for rent, another for sanity.”

  “What kind of construction do you do?”

  “It’s not really construction,” I clarify. “Sorry, that’s my canned answer. I share a workspace in Red Hook with other guys like me, doing a little bit of everything for the home. I build custom furniture. I’m not a steel girder and hard hat kind of guy, but I make a nice coffee table.”

  Paul clicks his fingers a few times, like he’s trying to place me. He takes another drag off his cigarette and says, “Can I get your number? Jenny up there is my wife—my partner,” he corrects in a stammer with a noticeable hostage twitch, “and she’s a novelist. She has thousands of books that are just sitting on the floor, so some built-ins in our living room might be perfect. I don’t know what that sort of thing costs, but I’ve been wanting to do something to thank her for whatever is going on now.”

  “Absolutely.” I fish a card out of my wallet. Rebecca had them made up for my last birthday. MICHAEL GOULD: HOME DESIGN AND IMPROVEMENT. I almost hesitate to hand one over, they’re such gorgeous cards. As with everything, Rebecca picked out the perfect paper stock, the perfect design. But I offer and he slips it into his front pocket. “Shouldn’t be too expensive, and I’m happy to offer you a discount, seeing as how our kids are going to be born on the same day.”

  “They are.” He chuckles. “Jesus. My son. You know yet what you’re having?”

  “A boy as well. You have a name picked out?”

  “No!” he shouts, manic and joyous. “Jenny and I can’t agree on one. She wants something literary and I don’t have a problem with that, but she’s going for deep cuts. Diggory, Rodolphe, Fitzwilliam.” I don’t know where any of those are from, but Paul dances in place, enamored with all of them. I’d hate to be the first guy to prick his balloon with a blank stare, so I nod knowingly instead. “You guys have a name picked out?” he asks.

  “It’s between Mark and Willem. After Rothko and De Kooning, the abstract expressionists.” If he’s not going to help me with his references, he can Google mine, though I add, “Those are the artists I like. I paint that style of art.” Rebecca likes Willem, because of the two syllables. She thinks Willem Gould sounds better than Mark Gould.

  “Fitzwilliam Sayles-Fenniger,” he recites. “When this is all done our kids should meet.”

  “Absolutely,” I reply. I’m down to the filter so I take a last drag and stamp it out underfoot. Though he still has a few drags left Paul does the same. I guess we’re friends now. I reach into my bag and make a decision, take the flask out, and unscrew the cap.

  “Paul, we’re going to become fathers tonight. My
wife packed this for me so I could celebrate. Will you drink with me?”

  “I’d like that very much, Michael. Thank you.” And I give him the first sip, which he takes, standing in front of a church in Park Slope, tilting his head back and making the universal face for when a shot of bourbon hits your throat. All squints and smacked lips. “Blanton’s?” he inquires, and I decide then and there that I like him.

  “Nothing but the best for our sons,” I reply, taking a slug of my own. Then we chew some peppermint gum, and laugh together because the combination of tastes is disgusting.

  When we get back to the waiting room the nurse is standing in our way. We both slow our stride, time itself slowing down. She’s got a grim set to her face, and bad news can’t reach us unless we allow ourselves to be sucked toward it. But it’s like an undertow, we keep getting closer, and she bridges the gap by striding up to both of us.

  “Michael Gould?” she says, and my heart shatters. Paul audibly exhales next to me.

  “That’s me,” I say hoarsely.

  “We’ve been trying to call you,” she says tartly. And I take out my phone, realizing that, per hospital policy, I turned it off when we came inside and never turned it back on again. And when I look up, her face isn’t grave anymore. It’s stern. She disapproves, that’s all.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is more than all right, Mr. Gould. You have a son.”

  Michael Gould

  One Year Ago: July 21, 2009

  My son, his head a giant garbanzo bean in shape and color, turned toward Rebecca’s swollen breast, one of her arms cradling him, the other stroking his tiny, booted foot. I watch them, idly stirring pasta in a pot of boiling water, steam fogging up the kitchen, masking the scent of freshly baked cookies. I smile at this portrait of domesticity and think about the lengths I would go to again and again to protect it.

  If four strung out meth heads came barreling into our apartment right now I would draw upon untapped stores of brutality latent in my being and destroy them, one at a time. I would pummel and choke, splatter their brains across our eggshell-painted walls before they could make their first demand, before my family could even notice the intruders. When my wife looked up, she would see four bodies on the floor, their heads caved in, and me standing over them, bloody entrails dangling through my fingers, merciless and primal. “Oh,” she’d say, “I thought I heard something,” and then she’d go back to cooing a culling song to our boy.