Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

When I was a teenager a fine old skyscraper sat at Forty-second Street between Lexington and Third. It was Aunt Myra’s favorite piece of hopeful architecture and she was the first person to name it to me: the Chrysler Building. They tore it down a few years after the elevators were stopped by the legislature in Albany. Elevators have counterweights and the whole thing wasn’t really necessary, but Albany wanted to show the world it was energy conscious. Its decree changed New York in a horrifying way, making the upper floors of all those unconscionably tall buildings inaccessible. Above the eighth it was all emptiness, derelicts and the odd fugitive.

Now where the Chrysler Building had once been there was the Heating Emporium, an open market for coal, wood, and alcohol, together with a few more exotic combustibles; I was glad to see the Belson Fuels corner well stocked and it pleased me to stand there a moment, looking like the raunchiest and most fragrant of bums, and see that each stick of neatly stacked cordwood had the name BELSON stamped on it in purple letters. Next to it was a heap of my coal, and that was not so pleasing. It was all bituminous, and you could tell it would be foul stuff by the color. But the Mafia had all the anthracite, and they weren’t about to let go of it in a controlled market.

I walked up Fifth to Fifty-third Street and turned over toward Madison. A couple of cops gave me a hostile eye, and a family of Chinese tourists seemed as boggled by me as a Chinese permits himself to be. A member of the capitalist underclass—one of the dregs. We do these things better in Hangchow. Well, in Hangchow I’d be wearing a gray uniform and sweeping the streets with a plastic broom and touching my forelock to the fat Communist bourgeois as they daintily strolled the streets with their chubby families. I liked being a disheveled bum in New York better, with my newfound pirate’s soul.

There was no doorman at the building and I walked up to the third floor. The apartment door had three locks. I banged loudly. After a minute the locks began clicking and, finally, the door opened. There was a small Japanese maid standing there, in uniform, staring up at me in shock.

I spoke softly to her, but with authority in my voice. “Tell Miss Belson it’s her father,” I said.

The maid nodded, shut the door and locked it. I waited. After several minutes it opened again and there was Myra, tall as ever, on crutches, looking at me quizzically for a moment. Finally she said, “Jesus Christ! Daddy .” She opened the door wider. “Jesus!” she said again.

I came in and hugged her. Gently, because Myra could be hurting almost anywhere. “It’s good to see you, honey,” I said. I was crying. I hadn’t thought about Myra much in the past few years—thinking about her could make me feel terrible—but I really loved her.

“Jesus, Daddy,” she said, “did you fall in?”

I shook my head. “Something like that.”

She laughed in that sort of childish way she has. Myra is almost thirty. “Let’s sit in the living room.” I followed her as she walked with care on her aluminum crutches into the big living room with windows looking down on Fifty-third Street. Myra had never met my Aunt Myra but she had somehow arrived, as if by reincarnation, at Aunt Myra’s style in interior decoration. I seated myself on a black velvet sofa, leaned back, and lit up a cigar. “I’ll wash up after a bit,” I said. She nodded and there was an embarrassed silence for a minute. There usually is, when I see her. “How about some coffee?” she said, “or whiskey?”

“Coffee.”

“Sure,” she said, with relief. “Martha, can you fix coffee for my father, with cream and sugar. I’ll have whiskey and soda.”

She turned back toward me and seated herself carefully in an armchair that faced the sofa I was sitting on. “You were on the TV news last night.” She laughed a bit uneasily. “They showed some old holos and called you the ‘billionaire fugitive,’ but it wasn’t clear what the police wanted you for.”

“The bastards,” I said. “ They don’t know what they want me for. It’s that son of a bitch Baynes, and probably the Mafia too.”

“I thought it was something like that. Is that uranium dangerous, Daddy?”

“No,” I said. “Hell, no. On the contrary. It’s the safest uranium in the universe. I feel like Galileo when those cardinals were after his ass. Have they bothered you?”

“No. Do they know you’re in New York?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve been sly about it. How’s your arthritis?”

She shrugged. “Same as always.”

“Hurts like hell?”

“Yes, Daddy. It hurts like hell.” She smiled at me in a way that might be described as “bravely” except that I sensed a hidden edge of blame in it. If only I had been around more during her childhood, had not been off in hotel suites dissolving corporations on paper in the middle of the night or bouncing around in bed with actresses or—let’s face it—finding ways of staying away from Anna and her fortitude, her unflinching zeal to be undeceived by the fripperies and fantasies of the world. If I hadn’t drunk so much when I was at home. If I hadn’t fought so much with Myra’s mother, bellowing my space pirate’s voice down the hallways and across the kitchens of whatever houses and apartments—in California or New York or Atlanta, or wherever my geographical yearnings took us…

Well, now I had endolin. “Myra,” I said, “I’ve got something for you.”

“Daddy.” She frowned. “I don’t need any more presents. Not even from outer space.”

“Honey,” I said, “this is no present.” I began unbuttoning my shirt, for a moment embarrassed by the sexual implications of what I was doing, being about to transfer that endolin wrapped to my sweating body to the body of my daughter sitting there in her stiff, arthritic way.

“What the hell…?” Myra said.

“It is something from another planet,” I said, pulling one of the bags filled with powder out from under the bandage that held it to my chest. I pushed aside a group of ivory netsuke and a Venetian-glass ashtray on Myra’s coffee table and set the packet of endolin down. Then I began opening the clear plastic carefully. My fingers trembled a little. “I have great hopes for you and this, Myra,” I said. I was shocked to hear my voice: vibrato , on the edge of tears. “I think it may be your anodyne…” I couldn’t finish. I got the bag open and looked at the powder sitting there, like some kind of super fix, a mainline for King Kong, that destructive fellow pirate in New York. Come on, Kong , I said to myself, do something good for someone you love, for a change .

“I’ll need to get a glass of water,” I said aloud, holding back tears. I stood up and barged into the kitchen, where Martha was putting ice in Myra’s drink of whiskey. I got a glass from a shelf and half-filled it with water. Then I grabbed a silver spoon from the sonic dishwasher and went into the living room again. I put a pinch of endolin into the water and stirred it, shakily.

“What in hell is going on , Daddy?” Myra was saying. She really was beginning to look alarmed. “You come in looking like a crazed derelict and then you pull out this Baggie of what looks like dope. They said on TV that you were a drug addict.

I let the glass sit there on the table and leaned back. I began buttoning up my shirt, less shaky now. “Well, there’s some truth in what they say, honey. I used morphine quite a bit. Got hooked on it in fact, trying to feed some dumb craving, but this isn’t morphine. No high comes with it. It’s only a painkiller.”