Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

Nathan had merely nodded, peeling Maria's fingers away, a small smile creeping across his face. It isn't me. It wasn't him. It was Maria, sobbing, hysterical, "I didn't know. How could I have known? It's not my fault my god please forgive me hailmaryfullofgrace."

Nathan had looked casually over the doctor's shoulder, at the assemblage of framed family faces that lined his sill. He looked past the windblown hair and the smiles and boat decks and through the window down Park Avenue, wanting to bring himself to some sort of conclusion, to achieve, even, some state of grace; knowing he should; that he would, he believed, his gaze plunging into a yellow river of taxicabs, if given time, he would actually feel something.

A violent burst of shivering rips through, and Nathan, reaching for the railing to steady himself, tips back his head and blinks. Though still he feels no cold. It stays vague and somewhere far 'de him, weather beyond the window, something he can go out in if he wants. Doctor E had forgotten to warn him about that, this numb impenetrability, so easily mistaken for perfection, for immortality. He tries and fails to laugh at himself, at the cruel swindle, opening his mouth to release the laughter but releasing instead dry breath, staccato pants. So tasting the sea air on his tongue he puts there a pill or two, he doesn't know which ones, he didn't see the colors, or the time-is it even time? And another for good luck. Why not still another? Why not, feeling little, stretch out in a rented room, turn on the oven, open his lips, pour in the whole vial, and truly feel-finally-nothing at all?

His eyes swim. Pinching them shut, his throat-as always these days-raw, the pills click inside his mouth like subway tokens.

Upwind, blue smoke and sparks flush through the boardwalk slats. Squinting unhappily without his glasses, Nathan spots movement below. Quickly he looks left and right up the beach and walks on, his shoes squeaking on the frost. But something alarming on the water has caught his eye. Unhappy, he tosses his coffee cup over the rail, clutching wood, and peers out.

Below him, a half-naked figure paces the shadows of a flaming oil drum, back and forth across the daylight. A nasal honk beneath the boardwalk, a whoop, a bellowed, "Hurry fools! Prepare thyselves!"

The pacing stops. Out in the light appears a head of thick red hair, a chin held aloft, then a pair of white tennis shorts fluttering at his hips, more loincloth than garment. The rest of him a flaccid patchwork of pinks and blues, his areolae puckered and browned like two gunshot wounds to the chest. He staggers on his heels – knees locked, bearing a blue-and-orange plastic horn with the logo of the New York Mets, a silhouette of the midtown skyline and the motto CATCH THE RISING STARS, the crackerjack prize from that fan remembrance day years ago when the Mets were contenders and the roster was filled with young talent. Ballasting himself in the wind, he aims the trumpet behind him. Out leaks a gurgling bleat.

"Clowns!" he cries "Fools, come on!"

One by one they emerge. From the open doorway of a tin cabana recessed beneath the boardwalk, short and fat, short and thin, old and withered, tall and stooped. At a windchill of minus ten Fahrenheit they are barefoot and equipped to swim. Racing suits, satin running shorts, a T-shirt and thong. Their bodies smoke. They wander the ice and cross ridges of frozen seafoam, obscured in shrouds of vapor.

Nathan would have laughed, but the sight haunts him instead. From behind, it seems an insurrection by inmates from a mental institution, their enactment of some joker's hypothesis about their primordial origins.

A fainter, garbled cry downwind.

The drunk has drifted, blowing his trumpet at the clouds gathering at the horizon, as though summoning the gods in New Jersey. He points threateningly. "Prepare ye, wimps!"

In the lee of a wave-break, a pair of hookers has stopped to watch. The bathers stamp the ice and pound their arms, but the hookers stand still, warding off the cold with routine refusal.

So it is a false alarm, Nathan sees. The water is clear. He palms down his thinning hair then leans his elbows on the rail like a man with nothing on his hands but time, hoping this, actually believing it to be, his very last time here-that plane south awaiting him on the tarmac, its engines whining-and looks more closely at the scene as though these few extra inches, if nothing else, will clarify it all.

Two men are probing through the cord grass of Jamaica Bay, high-stepping at a jog. Across the tops of the grass, the control tower at JFK; the tails of taxiing jets crossing like the fins of prowling sharks. Beyond, a mountainous landfill where clouds of birds are ripping off in the wind; beyond that, a tourist's diorama of Manhattan laid out end to end, red warning lights slowly blinking among the high-rises.

Two figures await them a hundred yards on. Unable to see down past his knees, Errol Santos stops to snap the collar of his coat around his chin, his eyes skittering about, taking the sparse clouds of gulls hovering overhead for signs of what lurks within.

A big man in his mid-thirties, just now giving up the battle against his tendency to turn to fat, Santos rustles through his coat pocket and produces a pack of cigarettes. He offers one to his own mouth and puts another to his companion's lips. Unshaven Barbados, the lines on his face saying drugs or the years of weather; he could be thirty-five, he could be fifty.

Santos draws deep and his chest tightens at once, his reedy exhale already a thin sigh, pulling air as if through a coffee stirrer. It's happening faster and faster; he pats his coat pockets, pats them again, then rummages through the old tissues and paper clips and pencil stubs for his inhaler, finally finding the little blue thing in his pants pocket. He pumps it into his mouth, pinching twice, his plumber's gas. The relief is instant, and even grants him a bonus shot of adrenaline to the heart, momentarily lightening his mood, clearing his eyes. By now he's forgotten which comes first, the cigarettes or the asthmatic strangle. He has inhalers planted everywhere, a little pump for every occasion, in the glove box of the car beside his lighter, on his bed stand, in his coat pocket with his cigarettes, one with the other, one always following the other.

"You should cut that." Barbados peers at him from under his cap.

Santos turns his head to offer his usual reply but Barbados has trudged on.

The body rests broken on a bed of grass, arms and legs akimbo. The cheek has been pulled back, the meat picked at. Prints of muddy claws cross the bridge of the nose.

One of the cops looks up. "You Brooklyn?"

"Why not," Barbados says.

"No blood," the other cop says.

Santos gestures downward. "You look underneath?"

The first cop shakes his head. "Hell of a place to leave a body."

"Who is this?" Barbados asks the partner.

The partner shrugs. "It's not his fault. He's new on the job."

Santos looks over one shoulder then the other. "Is this even Brooklyn? "

The four men, faces averted against the wind, scrutinize the empty marsh as though for a signpost. Snowy egrets return their stares.

"It doesn't matter," Barbados says. "This isn't a homicide."

"You still have to make the call," the partner says.

Barbados points his chin. "You make it."

"Suicide?" the neophyte asks.

A gull glides down and hangs overhead to investigate.

"In a manner of speaking," Santos says.

Above, an approaching growl, then the whine of jet engines reversing themselves. They all lift their heads. A massive plane passes at a thousand feet, skidding sideways in the crosswinds; the belly opens and the landing gear unfolds and locks into place. Santos waits, and nothing falls.